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".
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.
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
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).