Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports.
+ * "git-svn" used with SVN 1.8.0 when talking over https:// connection
+ dumped core due to a bug in the serf library that SVN uses. Work
+ it around on our side, even though the SVN side is being fixed.
+
+ * On MacOS X, we detected if the filesystem needs the "pre-composed
+ unicode strings" workaround, but did not automatically enable it.
+ Now we do.
+
+ * remote-hg remote helper misbehaved when interacting with a local Hg
+ repository relative to the home directory, e.g. "clone hg::~/there".
+
+ * imap-send ported to OS X uses Apple's security framework instead of
+ OpenSSL one.
+
+ * Subversion 1.8.0 that was recently released breaks older subversion
+ clients coming over http/https in various ways.
+
+ * "git fast-import" treats an empty path given to "ls" as the root of
+ the tree.
+
UI, Workflows & Features
+ * Instead of typing four capital letters "HEAD", you can say "@" now,
+ e.g. "git log @".
+
+ * "git check-ignore" follows the same rule as "git add" and "git
+ status" in that the ignore/exclude mechanism does not take effect
+ on paths that are already tracked. With "--no-index" option, it
+ can be used to diagnose which paths that should have been ignored
+ have been mistakenly added to the index.
+
+ * Some irrelevant "advice" messages that are shared with "git status"
+ output have been removed from the commit log template.
+
+ * "update-refs" learnt a "--stdin" option to read multiple update
+ requests and perform them in an all-or-none fashion.
+
+ * Just like "make -C <directory>", "git -C <directory> ..." tells Git
+ to go there before doing anything else.
+
+ * Just like "git checkout -" knows to check out and "git merge -"
+ knows to merge the branch you were previously on, "git cherry-pick"
+ now understands "git cherry-pick -" to pick from the previous
+ branch.
+
+ * "git status" now omits the prefix to make its output a comment in a
+ commit log editor, which is not necessary for human consumption.
+ Scripts that parse the output of "git status" are advised to use
+ "git status --porcelain" instead, as its format is stable and easier
+ to parse.
+
+ * Make "foo^{tag}" to peel a tag to itself, i.e. no-op., and fail if
+ "foo" is not a tag. "git rev-parse --verify v1.0^{tag}" would be
+ a more convenient way to say "test $(git cat-file -t v1.0) = tag".
+
+ * "git branch -v -v" (and "git status") did not distinguish among a
+ branch that does not build on any other branch, a branch that is in
+ sync with the branch it builds on, and a branch that is configured
+ to build on some other branch that no longer exists.
+
+ * A packfile that stores the same object more than once is broken and
+ will be rejected by "git index-pack" that is run when receiving
+ data over the wire.
+
+ * Earlier we started rejecting an attempt to add 0{40} object name to
+ the index and to tree objects, but it sometimes is necessary to
+ allow so to be able to use tools like filter-branch to correct such
+ broken tree objects. "filter-branch" can again be used to to do
+ so.
+
+ * "git config" did not provide a way to set or access numbers larger
+ than a native "int" on the platform; it now provides 64-bit signed
+ integers on all platforms.
+
+ * "git pull --rebase" always chose to do the bog-standard flattening
+ rebase. You can tell it to run "rebase --preserve-merges" by
+ setting "pull.rebase" configuration to "preserve".
+
+ * "git push --no-thin" actually disables the "thin pack transfer"
+ optimization.
+
+ * Magic pathspecs like ":(icase)makefile" that matches both
+ Makefile and makefile can be used in more places.
+
+ * The "http.*" variables can now be specified per URL that the
+ configuration applies. For example,
+
+ [http]
+ sslVerify = true
+ [http "https://weak.example.com/"]
+ sslVerify = false
+
+ would flip http.sslVerify off only when talking to that specified
+ site.
+
+ * "git mv A B" when moving a submodule A has been taught to
+ relocate its working tree and to adjust the paths in the
+ .gitmodules file.
+
+ * "git blame" can now take more than one -L option to discover the
+ origin of multiple blocks of the lines.
+
+ * The http transport clients can optionally ask to save cookies
+ with http.savecookies configuration variable.
+
+ * "git push" learned a more fine grained control over a blunt
+ "--force" when requesting a non-fast-forward update with the
+ "--force-with-lease=<refname>:<expected object name>" option.
+
+ * "git diff --diff-filter=<classes of changes>" can now take
+ lowercase letters (e.g. "--diff-filter=d") to mean "show
+ everything but these classes". "git diff-files -q" is now a
+ deprecated synonym for "git diff-files --diff-filter=d".
+
+ * "git fetch" (hence "git pull" as well) learned to check
+ "fetch.prune" and "remote.*.prune" configuration variables and
+ to behave as if the "--prune" command line option was given.
+
+ * "git check-ignore -z" applied the NUL termination to both its input
+ (with --stdin) and its output, but "git check-attr -z" ignored the
+ option on the output side. Make both honor -z on the input and
+ output side the same way.
+
* "git whatchanged" may still be used by old timers, but mention of
it in documents meant for new users will only waste readers' time
wonderig what the difference is between it and "git log". Make it
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
+ * If a build-time fallback is set to "cat" instead of "less", we
+ should apply the same "no subprocess or pipe" optimization as we
+ apply to user-supplied GIT_PAGER=cat.
+
+ * Many commands use --dashed-option as a operation mode selector
+ (e.g. "git tag --delete") that the user can use at most one
+ (e.g. "git tag --delete --verify" is a nonsense) and you cannot
+ negate (e.g. "git tag --no-delete" is a nonsense). parse-options
+ API learned a new OPT_CMDMODE macro to make it easier to implement
+ such a set of options.
+
+ * OPT_BOOLEAN() in parse-options API was misdesigned to be "counting
+ up" but many subcommands expect it to behave as "on/off". Update
+ them to use OPT_BOOL() which is a proper boolean.
+
+ * "git gc" exits early without doing a double-work when it detects
+ that another instance of itself is already running.
+
+ * Under memory pressure and/or file descriptor pressure, we used to
+ close pack windows that are not used and also closed filehandle to
+ an open but unused packfiles. These are now controlled separately
+ to better cope with the load.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).
+ * When running "fetch -q", a long silence while the sender side
+ computes the set of objects to send can be mistaken by proxies as
+ dropped connection. The server side has been taught to send a
+ small empty messages to keep the connection alive.
+ (merge 115dedd jk/upload-pack-keepalive later to maint).
+
+ * "git rebase" had a portability regression in v1.8.4 to trigger a
+ bug in some BSD shell implementations.
+ (merge 99855dd mm/rebase-continue-freebsd-WB later to maint).
+
+ * "git branch --track" had a minor regression in v1.8.3.2 and later
+ that made it impossible to base your local work on anything but a
+ local branch of the upstream repository you are tracking from.
+ (merge b0f49ff jh/checkout-auto-tracking later to maint).
+
+ * When the webserver responds with "405 Method Not Allowed", "git
+ http-backend" should tell the client what methods are allowed with
+ the "Allow" header.
+ (merge 9247be0 bc/http-backend-allow-405 later to maint).
+
+ * When there is no sufficient overlap between old and new history
+ during a "git fetch" into a shallow repository, objects that the
+ sending side knows the receiving end has were unnecessarily sent.
+ (merge f21d2a7 nd/fetch-into-shallow later to maint).
+
+ * "git cvsserver" computed the permission mode bits incorrectly for
+ executable files.
+ (merge 1b48d56 jc/cvsserver-perm-bit-fix later to maint).
+
+ * When send-email comes up with an error message to die with upon
+ failure to start an SSL session, it tried to read the error string
+ from a wrong place.
+ (merge 6cb0c88 bc/send-email-ssl-die-message-fix later to maint).
+
+ * The implementation of "add -i" has a crippling code to work around
+ ActiveState Perl limitation but it by mistake also triggered on Git
+ for Windows where MSYS perl is used.
+ (merge df17e77 js/add-i-mingw later to maint).
+
+ * We made sure that we notice the user-supplied GIT_DIR is actually a
+ gitfile, but did not do the same when the default ".git" is a
+ gitfile.
+ (merge 487a2b7 nd/git-dir-pointing-at-gitfile later to maint).
+
+ * When an object is not found after checking the packfiles and then
+ loose object directory, read_sha1_file() re-checks the packfiles to
+ prevent racing with a concurrent repacker; teach the same logic to
+ has_sha1_file().
+ (merge 45e8a74 jk/has-sha1-file-retry-packed later to maint).
+
+ * "git commit --author=$name", when $name is not in the canonical
+ "A. U. Thor <au.thor@example.xz>" format, looks for a matching name
+ from existing history, but did not consult mailmap to grab the
+ preferred author name.
+ (merge ea16794 ap/commit-author-mailmap later to maint).
+
+ * "git ls-files -k" needs to crawl only the part of the working tree
+ that may overlap the paths in the index to find killed files, but
+ shared code with the logic to find all the untracked files, which
+ made it unnecessarily inefficient.
+ (merge 680be04 jc/ls-files-killed-optim later to maint).
+
+ * The commit object names in the insn sheet that was prepared at the
+ beginning of "rebase -i" session can become ambiguous as the
+ rebasing progresses and the repository gains more commits. Make
+ sure the internal record is kept with full 40-hex object names.
+ (merge 75c6976 es/rebase-i-no-abbrev later to maint).
+
+ * "git rebase --preserve-merges" internally used the merge machinery
+ and as a side effect, left merge summary message in the log, but
+ when rebasing, there should not be a need for merge summary.
+ (merge a9f739c rt/rebase-p-no-merge-summary later to maint).
+
+ * A call to xread() was used without a loop around to cope with short
+ read in the codepath to stream new contents to a pack.
+ (merge e92527c js/xread-in-full later to maint).
+
+ * "git rebase -i" forgot that the comment character can be
+ configurable while reading its insn sheet.
+ (merge 7bca7af es/rebase-i-respect-core-commentchar later to maint).
+
+ * The mailmap support code read past the allocated buffer when the
+ mailmap file ended with an incomplete line.
+ (merge f972a16 jk/mailmap-incomplete-line later to maint).
+
+ * We used to send a large request to read(2)/write(2) as a single
+ system call, which was bad from the latency point of view when
+ the operation needs to be killed, and also triggered an error on
+ broken 64-bit systems that refuse to take more than 2GB read or
+ write in one go.
+ (merge a487916 sp/clip-read-write-to-8mb later to maint).
+
+ * "git fetch" that auto-followed tags incorrectly reused the
+ connection with Git-aware transport helper (like the sample "ext::"
+ helper shipped with Git).
+ (merge 0f73f8b jc/transport-do-not-use-connect-twice-in-fetch later to maint).
+
+ * "git log --full-diff -- <pathspec>" showed a huge diff for paths
+ outside the given <pathspec> for each commit, instead of showing
+ the change relative to the parent of the commit. "git reflog -p"
+ had a similar problem.
+ (merge 838f9a1 tr/log-full-diff-keep-true-parents later to maint).
+
+ * Setting submodule.*.path configuration variable to true (without
+ giving "= value") caused Git to segfault.
+ (merge 4b05440 jl/some-submodule-config-are-not-boolean later to maint).
+
+ * "git rebase -i" (there could be others, as the root cause is pretty
+ generic) fed a random, data dependeant string to 'echo' and
+ expects it to come out literally, corrupting its error message.
+ (merge 89b0230 mm/no-shell-escape-in-die-message later to maint).
+
* Some people still use rather old versions of bash, which cannot
grok some constructs like 'printf -v varname' the prompt and
completion code started to use recently.