UI, Workflows & Features
* "branch --delete" has "branch -d" but "push --delete" does not.
- (merge 38a2559 ps/push-delete-option later to maint).
* "git blame" learned to produce the progress eye-candy when it takes
too much time before emitting the first line of the result.
* "interpret-trailers" has been taught to optionally update a file in
place, instead of always writing the result to the standard output.
+ * Many commands that read files that are expected to contain text
+ that is generated (or can be edited) by the end user to control
+ their behaviour (e.g. "git grep -f <filename>") have been updated
+ to be more tolerant to lines that are terminated with CRLF (they
+ used to treat such a line to contain payload that ends with CR,
+ which is usually not what the users expect).
+
+ * "git notes merge" used to limit the source of the merged notes tree
+ to somewhere under refs/notes/ hierarchy, which was too limiting
+ when inventing a workflow to exchange notes with remote
+ repositories using remote-tracking notes trees (located in e.g.
+ refs/remote-notes/ or somesuch).
+
+ * "git ls-files" learned a new "--eol" option to help diagnose
+ end-of-line problems.
+
+ * "ls-remote" learned an option to show which branch the remote
+ repository advertises as its primary by pointing its HEAD at.
+
+ * New http.proxyAuthMethod configuration variable can be used to
+ specify what authentication method to use, as a way to work around
+ proxies that do not give error response expected by libcurl when
+ CURLAUTH_ANY is used. Also, the codepath for proxy authentication
+ has been taught to use credential API to store the authentication
+ material in user's keyrings.
+
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
(e.g. there is no need to collect the log messages when showing
only the number of changes).
+ * "git checkout $branch" (and other operations that share the same
+ underlying machinery) has been optimized.
+
+ * Automated tests in Travis CI environment has been optimized by
+ persisting runtime statistics of previous "prove" run, executing
+ tests that take longer before other ones; this reduces the total
+ wallclock time.
+
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
1.9.0 and later.
(merge 0b66415 ew/svn-1.9.0-auth later to maint).
+ * The "split" subcommand of "git subtree" (in contrib/) incorrectly
+ skipped merges when it shouldn't, which was corrected.
+ (merge 933cfeb dw/subtree-split-do-not-drop-merge later to maint).
+
+ * A few options of "git diff" did not work well when the command was
+ run from a subdirectory.
+ (merge a97262c nd/diff-with-path-params later to maint).
+
+ * The command line completion learned a handful of additional options
+ and command specific syntax.
+ (merge fa4b5e3 jk/completion-rebase later to maint).
+ (merge f7c2e1a pw/completion-show-branch later to maint).
+ (merge d7d4ca8 pw/completion-stash later to maint).
+ (merge e6414b4 tb/complete-word-diff-regex later to maint).
+
+ * dirname() emulation has been added, as Msys2 lacks it.
+ (merge e7d5ce8 js/dirname-basename later to maint).
+
+ * The underlying machinery used by "ls-files -o" and other commands
+ have been taught not to create empty submodule ref cache for a
+ directory that is not a submodule. This removes a ton of wasted
+ CPU cycles.
+ (merge a2d5156 jk/ref-cache-non-repository-optim later to maint).
+
* Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates
(merge 99487cf ss/user-manual later to maint).
(merge e914ef0 ew/for-each-ref-doc later to maint).
(merge 36fc7d8 sg/t6050-failing-editor-test-fix later to maint).
(merge 60253a6 ss/clone-depth-single-doc later to maint).
+ (merge bd02e97 lv/add-doc-working-tree later to maint).