Updates since v1.8.3
--------------------
-Foreign interfaces and ports.
+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
UI, Workflows & Features
+ * Having multiple "fixup!" on a line in the rebase instruction sheet
+ did not work very well with "git rebase -i --autosquash".
+
+ * "git log" learned the "--author-date-order" option, with which the
+ output is topologically sorted and commits in parallel histories
+ are shown intermixed together based on the author timestamp.
+
+ * Various subcommands of "git submodule" refused to run from anywhere
+ other than the top of the working tree of the superproject, but
+ they have been taught to let you run from a subdirectory.
+
+ * "git diff" learned a mode that ignores hunks whose change consists
+ only of additions and removals of blank lines, which is the same as
+ "diff -B" (ignore blank lines) of GNU diff.
+
+ * "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
* "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).
+ 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 @".
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
+ * The original way to specify remote repository using .git/branches/
+ used to have a nifty feature. The code to support the feature was
+ still in a function but the caller was changed not to call it 5
+ years ago, breaking that feature and leaving the supporting code
+ unreachable. The dead code has been removed.
+
+ * "git pack-refs" that races with new ref creation or deletion have
+ been susceptible to lossage of refs under right conditions, which
+ has been tightened up.
+
+ * We read loose and packed rerferences in two steps, but after
+ deciding to read a loose ref but before actually opening it to read
+ it, another process racing with us can unlink it, which would cause
+ us to barf. The codepath has been updated to retry when such a
+ race is detected, instead of outright failing.
+
+ * 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.
track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).
+ * The configuration variable column.ui was poorly documented.
+ (merge 5e62cc1 rr/column-doc later to maint).
+
+ * "git name-rev --refs=tags/v*" were forbidden, which was a bit
+ inconvenient (you had to give a pattern to match refs fully, like
+ --refs=refs/tags/v*).
+ (merge 98c5c4a nk/name-rev-abbreviated-refs later to maint).
+
+ * "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).
+
+ * Older cURL wanted piece of memory we call it with to be stable, but
+ we updated the auth material after handing it to a call.
+ (merge a94cf2c bc/http-keep-memory-given-to-curl later to maint).
+
+ * "git pull" into nothing trashed "local changes" that were in the
+ index, and this avoids it.
+ (merge b4dc085 jk/pull-into-dirty-unborn 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). It also mishandled names that need RFC2047
+ quoting.
+ (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.