Backward compatibility notes
----------------------------
-In the upcoming major release (tentatively called 1.8.2), we will
-change the behavior of the "git push" command.
+In the next major release Git 2.0 (not *this* one), we will change the
+behavior of the "git push" command.
When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the
traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent
and starting with this release, any attempt to update an existing
ref under refs/tags/ hierarchy will fail, without "--force".
+When "git add -u" and "git add -A", that does not specify what paths
+to add on the command line, is run from inside a subdirectory, the
+scope of the operation has always been limited to the subirectory.
+Many users found this counter-intuitive, given that "git commit -a"
+and other commands operate on the entire tree regardless of where you
+are. In this release, these commands give warning in such a case and
+encourage the user to say "git add -u/-A ." instead when restricting
+the scope to the current directory. At Git 2.0 (not *this* one), we
+plan to change these commands without pathspec to operate on the
+entire tree, and training your fingers to type "." will protect you
+against the future change.
+
Updates since v1.8.1
--------------------
* "git commit" can be told to use --cleanup=whitespace by setting the
configuration variable commit.cleanup to 'whitespace'.
+ * "git diff" and other Porcelain commands can be told to use a
+ non-standard algorithm by setting diff.algorithm configuration
+ variable.
+
* "git fetch --mirror" and fetch that uses other forms of refspec
with wildcard used to attempt to update a symbolic ref that match
the wildcard on the receiving end, which made little sense (the
* "git log --cc --graph" now shows the combined diff output with the
ancestry graph.
+ * "git log --grep=<pattern>" honors i18n.logoutputencoding to look
+ for the pattern after fixing the log message to the specified
+ encoding.
+
* "git mergetool" and "git difftool" learned to list the available
tool backends in a more consistent manner.
tip of the remote branch (as opposed to integrating with the commit
recorded in the superproject's gitlink).
+ * "git upload-pack" which implements the service "ls-remote" and
+ "fetch" talk to can be told to hide ref hierarchies the server
+ side internally uses (and that clients have no business learning
+ about) with transfer.hiderefs configuration.
+
Foreign Interface
these implementations can reliably update. This can be used to
avoid excessive revalidation of contents.
+ * Some platforms ship with old version of expat where xmlparse.h
+ needs to be included instead of expat.h; the build procedure has
+ been taught about this.
+
+ * "make clean" on platforms that cannot compute header dependencies
+ on the fly did not work with implementations of "rm" that do not
+ like an empty argument list.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
* Command line completion code was inadvertently made incompatible with
older versions of bash by using a newer array notation.
+ * "git push" was taught to refuse updating the branch that is
+ currently checked out long time ago, but the user manual was left
+ stale.
+ (merge d9be248 wk/man-deny-current-branch-is-default-these-days later to maint).
+
* Some shells do not behave correctly when IFS is unset; work it
around by explicitly setting it to the default value.