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".
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