Updates since v1.8.3
--------------------
-Foreign interface
+Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports.
+
+ * Git-gui has been updated to its 0.18.0 version.
+
+ * MediaWiki remote helper (in contrib/) has been updated to use the
+ credential helper interface from Git.pm.
+
+ * Update build for Cygwin 1.[57]. Torsten Bögershausen reports that
+ this is fine with Cygwin 1.7 ($gmane/225824) so let's try moving it
+ ahead.
+
+ * The credential helper to talk to keychain on OS X (in contrib/) has
+ been updated to kick in not just when talking http/https but also
+ imap(s) and smtp.
* Remote transport helper has been updated to report errors and
maintain ref hierarchy used to keep track of its own state better.
+ * With "export" remote-helper protocol, (1) a push that tries to
+ update a remote ref whose name is different from the pushing side
+ does not work yet, and (2) the helper may not know how to do
+ --dry-run; these problematic cases are disabled for now.
+
+ * git-remote-hg/bzr (in contrib/) updates.
+
+ * git-remote-mw (in contrib/) hints users to check the certificate,
+ when https:// connection failed.
+
UI, Workflows & Features
+ * "git rm" gives a single message followed by list of paths to report
+ multiple paths that cannot be removed.
+
+ * "git rebase" can be told with ":/look for this string" syntax commits
+ to replay the changes onto and where the work to be replayed begins.
+
+ * Many tutorials teach users to set "color.ui" to "auto" as the first
+ thing after you set "user.name/email" to introduce yourselves to
+ Git. Now the variable defaults to "auto".
+
+ * On Cygwin, "cygstart" is now recognised as a possible way to start
+ a web browser (used in "help -w" and "instaweb" among others).
+
+### * "git status" learned status.branch and status.short configuration
+### variables to use --branch and --short options by default (override
+### with --no-branch and --no-short options from the command line).
+
+ * "git cmd <name>", when <name> happens to be a 40-hex string,
+ directly uses the 40-hex string as an object name, even if a ref
+ "refs/<some hierarchy>/<name>" exists. This disambiguation order
+ is unlikely to change, but we should warn about the ambiguity just
+ like we warn when more than one refs/ hierachies share the same
+ name.
+
+ * "git rebase" learned "--[no-]autostash" option to save local
+ changes instead of refusing to run (to which people's normal
+ response was to stash them and re-run). This introduced a corner
+ case breakage to "git am --abort" but it has been fixed.
+
+ * Instead of typing four capital letters "HEAD", you can say "@" now,
+ e.g. "git log @".
+
* "check-ignore" (new feature since 1.8.2) has been updated to work
more like "check-attr" over bidi-pipes.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
+ * Uses of the platform fnmatch(3) function (many places in the code,
+ matching pathspec, .gitignore and .gitattributes to name a few)
+ have been replaced with wildmatch, allowing "foo/**/bar" that would
+ match foo/bar, foo/a/bar, foo/a/b/bar, etc.
+
+ * Memory ownership and lifetime rules for what for-each-ref feeds to
+ its callbacks have been clarified (in short, "you do not own it, so
+ make a copy if you want to keep it").
+
+ * The revision traversal logic to improve culling of irrelevant
+ parents while traversing a mergy history has been updated.
+
+ * Some leaks in unpack-trees (used in merge, cherry-pick and other
+ codepaths) have been plugged.
+
* The codepath to read from marks files in fast-import/export did not
have to accept anything but 40-hex representation of the object
name. Further, fast-export did not need full in-core object
inconsistently between the test framework and t/Makefile, and logic
to summarize the results looked at a wrong place.
+ * "git clone" uses a lighter-weight implementation when making sure
+ that the history behind refs are complete.
+
* Many warnings from sparse source checker in compat/ area has been
squelched.
track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).
+ * "git apply" parsed patches that add new files, generated by
+ programs other than Git, incorrectly. This is an old breakage in
+ v1.7.11 and will need to be merged down to the maintanance tracks.
+ (merge 212eb96 tr/maint-apply-non-git-patch-parsefix later to maint).
+
+ * Many "git submodule" operations do not work on a submodule at a
+ path whose name is not in ASCII.
+ (merge bed9470 fg/submodule-non-ascii-path later to maint).
+
+ * "cherry-pick" had a small leak in an error codepath.
+ (merge 706728a fc/sequencer-plug-leak later to maint).
+
+ * Logic used by git-send-email to suppress cc mishandled names like
+ "A U. Thor" <author@example.xz>, where the human readable part
+ needs to be quoted (the user input may not have the double quotes
+ around the name, and comparison was done between quoted and
+ unquoted strings).
+ (merge 1495266 mt/send-email-cc-match-fix later to maint).
+
+ * Call to discard_cache/discard_index (used when we use different
+ contents of the index in-core, in many operations like commit,
+ apply, and merge) used to leak memory that held the array of index
+ entries, which has been plugged.
+ (merge a0fc4db rs/discard-index-discard-array later to maint).
+
+ * "gitweb" forgot to clear a global variable $search_regexp upon each
+ request, mistakenly carrying over the previous search to a new one
+ when used as a persistent CGI.
+ (merge ca7a5dc cm/gitweb-project-list-persistent-cgi-fix later to maint).
+
+ * The wildmatch engine did not honor WM_CASEFOLD option correctly.
+ (merge b79c0c3 ar/wildmatch-foldcase later to maint).
+
+ * "git log -c --follow $path" segfaulted upon hitting the commit that
+ renamed the $path being followed.
+ (merge 46ec510 cb/log-follow-with-combined later to maint).
+
+ * When a reflog notation is used for implicit "current branch", we
+ did not say which branch and worse said "branch ''".
+ (merge 305ebea rr/die-on-missing-upstream later to maint).
+
+ * "difftool --dir-diff" did not copy back changes made by the
+ end-user in the diff tool backend to the working tree in some
+ cases.
+ (merge 32eaf1d ks/difftool-dir-diff-copy-fix later to maint).
+
+ * "git push $there HEAD:branch" did not resolve HEAD early enough, so
+ it was easy to flip it around while push is still going on and push
+ out a branch that the user did not originally intended when the
+ command was started.
+ (merge 0f075b2 rr/push-head later to maint).
+
+ * The bash prompt code (in contrib/) displayed the name of the branch
+ being rebased when "rebase -i/-m/-p" modes are in use, but not the
+ plain vanilla "rebase".
+ (merge 1306321 fc/show-branch-in-rebase-am later to maint).
+
* Handling of negative exclude pattern for directories "!dir" was
broken in the update to v1.8.3.
(merge c3c327d kb/status-ignored-optim-2 later to maint).