* A third-party tool "git subtree" is distributed in contrib/
+ * Even with "-q"uiet option, "checkout" used to report setting up
+ tracking. Also "branch" learned the "-q"uiet option to squelch
+ informational message.
+
+ * The smart-http backend used to always override GIT_COMMITTER_*
+ variables with REMOTE_USER and REMOTE_ADDR, but these variables are
+ now preserved when set.
+
+ * A 'snapshot' request to "gitweb" honors If-Modified-Since: header,
+ based on the commit date.
Foreign Interface
Internal Implementation (please report possible regressions)
+ * Minor memory leak during unpack_trees (hence "merge" and "checkout"
+ to check out another branch) has been plugged.
+
+ * More lower-level commands learned to use the streaming API to read
+ from the object store without keeping everything in core.
+
+ * Because "sh" on the user's PATH may be utterly broken on some
+ systems, run-command API now uses SHELL_PATH, not /bin/sh, when
+ spawning an external command.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.10 in the maintenance
releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).
+
+ * "git clean -d -f" (not "-d -f -f") is supposed to protect nested
+ working trees of independent git repositories that exist in the
+ current project working tree from getting removed, but the
+ protection applied only to such working trees that are at the
+ top-level of the current project by mistake.
+ (merge ae2f203 jc/maint-clean-nested-worktree-in-subdir later to maint).
+
+ * Rename detection logic used to match two empty files as renames
+ during merge-recursive, leading unnatural mismerges.
+ (merge 4f7cb99 jk/diff-no-rename-empty later to maint).
+
+ * An age-old corner case bug in combine diff (only triggered with -U0
+ and the hunk at the beginning of the file needs to be shown) has
+ been fixed.
+ (merge e5e9b56 rs/combine-diff-zero-context-at-the-beginning later to maint).
+
+ * When "git commit --template F" errors out because the user did not
+ touch the message, it claimed that it aborts due to "empty
+ message", which was utterly wrong.
+ (merge 1f08c2c jc/commit-unedited-template later to maint).
+
+ * "git add -p" is not designed to deal with unmerged paths but did
+ not exclude them and tried to apply funny patches only to fail.
+ (merge 4066bd6 jk/add-p-skip-conflicts later to maint).
+
+ * "git commit --author=$name" did not tell the name that was being
+ recorded in the resulting commit to hooks, even though it does do
+ so when the end user overrode the authorship via the
+ "GIT_AUTHOR_NAME" environment variable.
+ (merge 7dfe8ad jc/commit-hook-authorship later to maint).
+
+ * The regexp configured with diff.wordregex was incorrectly reused
+ across files.
+ (merge 6440d34 tr/maint-word-diff-regex-sticky later to maint).
+
+ * Running "notes merge --commit" failed to perform correctly when run
+ from any directory inside $GIT_DIR/. When "notes merge" stops with
+ conflicts, $GIT_DIR/NOTES_MERGE_WORKTREE is the place a user edits
+ to resolve it.
+ (merge dabba59 jh/notes-merge-in-git-dir-worktree later to maint).