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
+ * 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".
+
+ * "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).
+
+ * 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.
+ * "git describe" learned "--first-parent" option to limit its closest
+ tagged commit search to the first-parent chain.
+
+ * "git merge foo" that might have meant "git merge origin/foo" is
+ diagnosed with a more informative error message.
+
+ * "git log -L<line>,<range>:<filename>" has been added. This may
+ still have leaks and rough edges, though.
+
* We used the approxidate() parser for "--expire=<timestamp>" options
of various commands, but it is better to treat --expire=all and
--expire=now a bit more specially than using the current timestamp.
"git gc" and "git reflog" have been updated with a new parsing
function for expiry dates.
+ * Updates to completion (both bash and zsh) helpers.
+
+ * The behaviour of the "--chain-reply-to" option of "git send-email"
+ have changed at 1.7.0, and we added a warning/advice message to
+ help users adjust to the new behaviour back then, but we kept it
+ around for too long. The message has finally been removed.
+
+ * "git fetch origin master" unlike "git fetch origin" or "git fetch"
+ did not update "refs/remotes/origin/master"; this was an early
+ design decision to keep the update of remote tracking branches
+ predictable, but in practice it turns out that people find it more
+ convenient to opportunistically update them whenever we have a
+ chance, and we have been updating them when we run "git push" which
+ already breaks the original "predictability" anyway.
+
+ * The configuration variable core.checkstat was advertised in the
+ documentation but the code expected core.statinfo instead.
+ For now, we accept both core.checkstat and core.statinfo, but the
+ latter will be removed in the longer term.
+
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
+ representation to have parsed wen reading from them. These
+ codepaths have been optimized by taking advantage of these access
+ patterns.
+
* Object lookup logic, when the object hashtable starts to become
crowded, has been optimized.
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).
+ * 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).
+
+ * zsh prompt script that borrowed from bash prompt script did not
+ work due to slight differences in array variable notation between
+ these two shells.
+ (merge d0583da tg/maint-zsh-svn-remote-prompt later to maint).
+
+ * An entry for "file://" scheme in the enumeration of URL types Git
+ can take in the HTML documentation was made into a clickable link
+ by mistake.
+ (merge 4c32e36 nd/urls-doc-no-file-hyperlink-fix later to maint).
+
+ * "git push --[no-]verify" was not documented.
+ (merge 90d32d1 tr/push-no-verify-doc later to maint).
+
+ * Stop installing the git-remote-testpy script that is only used for
+ testing.
+ (merge 416fda6 fc/makefile later to maint).
+
+ * "git commit --allow-empty-message -m ''" should not start an
+ editor.
+ (merge 2520677 rs/commit-m-no-edit later to maint).
+
+ * "git merge @{-1}~22" was rewritten to "git merge frotz@{1}~22"
+ incorrectly when your previous branch was "frotz" (it should be
+ rewritten to "git merge frotz~22" instead).
+ (merge 84cf246 jc/strbuf-branchname-fix later to maint).
+
+ * "git diff -c -p" was not showing a deleted line from a hunk when
+ another hunk immediately begins where the earlier one ends.
+ (merge aac3857 mk/combine-diff-context-horizon-fix later to maint).
+
+ * "git log --ancestry-path A...B" did not work as expected, as it did
+ not pay attention to the fact that the merge base between A and B
+ was the bottom of the range being specified.
+ (merge a765499 kb/ancestry-path-threedots later to maint).
+
+ * Mac OS X does not like to write(2) more than INT_MAX number of
+ bytes; work it around by chopping write(2) into smaller pieces.
+ (merge 6c642a8 fc/macos-x-clipped-write later to maint).
+
+ * Newer MacOS X encourages the programs to compile and link with
+ their CommonCrypto, not with OpenSSL.
+ (merge be4c828 da/darwin later to maint).
+
+ * "git clone foo/bar:baz" cannot be a request to clone from a remote
+ over git-over-ssh specified in the scp style. This case is now
+ detected and clones from a local repository at "foo/bar:baz".
+ (merge 6000334 nd/clone-local-with-colon later to maint).
+
* When $HOME is misconfigured to point at an unreadable directory, we
used to complain and die. Loosen the check.
(merge 4698c8f jn/config-ignore-inaccessible later to maint).