UI, Workflows & Features
+ * When the interactive access to git-shell is not enabled, it issues
+ a message meant to help the system admininstrator to enable it.
+ An explicit way to help the end users who connect to the service by
+ issuing custom messages to refuse such an access has been added.
+ * In addition to the case where the user edits the log message with
+ the "e)dit" option of "am -i", replace the "Applying: this patch"
+ message with the final log message contents after applymsg hook
+ munges it.
-Foreign Interface
+ * "git status" suggests users to look into using --untracked=no option
+ when it takes too long.
+ * "git status" shows a bit more information to "git status" during a
+ rebase/bisect session.
+
+ * "git fetch" learned to fetch a commit at the tip of an unadvertised
+ ref by specifying a raw object name from the command line when the
+ server side supports this feature.
+
+ * "git count-objects -v" learned to report leftover temporary
+ packfiles and other garbage in the object store.
+
+ * A new read-only credential helper (in contrib/) to interact with
+ the .netrc/.authinfo files has been added.
+
+ * "git send-email" can be used with the credential helper system.
+
+ * There was no Porcelain way to say "I no longer am interested in
+ this submodule", once you express your interest in a submodule with
+ "submodule init". "submodule deinit" is the way to do so.
+
+ * "git pull --rebase" learned to pass "-v/-q" options to underlying
+ "git rebase".
+
+ * The new "--follow-tags" option tells "git push" to push relevant
+ annotated tags when pushing branches out.
+
+ * "git mergetool" now feeds files to the "p4merge" backend in the
+ order that matches the p4 convention, where "theirs" is usually
+ shown on the left side, which is the opposite from other backend
+ expects.
+
+ * "show/log" now honors gpg.program configuration just like other
+ parts of the code that use GnuPG.
+
+ * "git log" that shows the difference between the parent and the
+ child has been optimized somewhat.
+
+ * "git difftool" allows the user to write into the temporary files
+ being shown; if the user makes changes to the working tree at the
+ same time, one of the changes has to be lost in such a case, but it
+ tells the user what happened and refrains from overwriting the copy
+ in the working tree.
+
+ * There was no good way to ask "I have a random string that came from
+ outside world. I want to turn it into a 40-hex object name while
+ making sure such an object exists". A new peeling suffix ^{object}
+ can be used for that purpose, together with "rev-parse --verify".
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
+ * Updates for building under msvc.
+
+ * A few codepaths knew how much data they need to put in the
+ hashtables they use upfront, but still started from a small table
+ repeatedly growing and rehashing.
+
+ * The API to walk reflog entries from the latest to older, which was
+ necessary for operations such as "git checkout -", was cumbersome
+ to use correctly and also inefficient.
+
+ * Codepaths that inspect log-message-to-be and decide when to add a
+ new Signed-off-by line in various commands have been consolidated.
+
+ * The pkt-line API, implementation and its callers have been cleaned
+ up to make them more robust.
+
+ * Cygwin port has a faster-but-lying lstat(2) emulation whose
+ incorrectness does not matter in practice except for a few
+ codepaths, and setting permission bits to directories is a codepath
+ that needs to use a more correct one.
+
+ * "git checkout" had repeated pathspec matches on the same paths,
+ which have been consolidated. Also a bug in "git checkout dir/"
+ that is started from an unmerged index has been fixed.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.2 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).
+
+ * Fix 1.8.1.x regression that stopped matching "dir" (without
+ trailing slash) to a directory "dir".
+ (merge efa5f82 jc/directory-attrs-regression-fix later to maint-1.8.1).
+
+ * "git apply --whitespace=fix" was not prepared to see a line getting
+ longer after fixing whitespaces (e.g. tab-in-indent aka Python).
+ (merge 329b26e jc/apply-ws-fix-tab-in-indent later to maint-1.8.1).
+
+ * The prompt string generator (in contrib/completion/) did not notice
+ when we are in a middle of a "git revert" session.
+ (merge 3ee4452 rr/prompt-revert-head later to maint).
+
+ * "submodule summary --summary-limit" option did not support
+ "--option=value" form.
+ (merge 862ae6c rs/submodule-summary-limit later to maint).
+
+ * "index-pack --fix-thin" used uninitialize value to compute delta
+ depths of objects it appends to the resulting pack.
+ (merge 57165db jk/index-pack-correct-depth-fix later to maint).
+
+ * "index-pack --verify-stat" used a few counters outside protection
+ of mutex, possibly showing incorrect numbers.
+ (merge 8f82aad nd/index-pack-threaded-fixes later to maint).
+
+ * The code to keep track of what directory names are known to Git on
+ platforms with case insensitive filesystems can get confused upon a
+ hash collision between these pathnames and looped forever.
+
+ * Annotated tags outside refs/tags/ hierarchy were not advertised
+ correctly to the ls-remote and fetch with recent version of Git.
+
+ * Recent optimization broke shallow clones.
+ (merge f59de5d jk/peel-ref later to maint).
+
+ * "git cmd -- ':(top'" was not diagnosed as an invalid syntax, and
+ instead the parser kept reading beyond the end of the string.
+
+ * "git tag -f <tag>" always said "Updated tag '<tag>'" even when
+ creating a new tag (i.e. not overwriting nor updating).
+
+ * "git p4" did not behave well when the path to the root of the P4
+ client was not its real path.
+ (merge bbd8486 pw/p4-symlinked-root later to maint).
+
+ * "git archive" reports a failure when asked to create an archive out
+ of an empty tree. It would be more intuitive to give an empty
+ archive back in such a case.
+
+ * When "format-patch" quoted a non-ascii strings on the header files,
+ it incorrectly applied rfc2047 and chopped a single character in
+ the middle of it.
+
+ * An aliased command spawned from a bare repository that does not say
+ it is bare with "core.bare = yes" is treated as non-bare by mistake.
+
+ * In "git reflog expire", REACHABLE bit was not cleared from the
+ correct objects.
+
+ * The logic used by "git diff -M --stat" to shorten the names of
+ files before and after a rename did not work correctly when the
+ common prefix and suffix between the two filenames overlapped.
+
+ * The "--match=<pattern>" option of "git describe", when used with
+ "--all" to allow refs that are not annotated tags to be used as a
+ base of description, did not restrict the output from the command
+ to those that match the given pattern.
+
+ * Clarify in the documentation "what" gets pushed to "where" when the
+ command line to "git push" does not say these explicitly.
+
+ * The "--color=<when>" argument to the commands in the diff family
+ was described poorly.
+
+ * The arguments given to pre-rebase hook were not documented.
+
+ * The v4 index format was not documented.
+
+ * The "--match=<pattern>" argument "git describe" takes uses glob
+ pattern but it wasn't obvious from the documentation.
+
+ * Some sources failed to compile on systems that lack NI_MAXHOST in
+ their system header (e.g. z/OS).
+
+ * Add an example use of "--env-filter" in "filter-branch"
+ documentation.
+
+ * "git bundle verify" did not say "records a complete history" for a
+ bundle that does not have any prerequisites.
+
+ * In the v1.8.0 era, we changed symbols that do not have to be global
+ to file scope static, but a few functions in graph.c were used by
+ CGit from sideways bypassing the entry points of the API the
+ in-tree users use.
+
+ * "git update-index -h" did not do the usual "-h(elp)" thing.
+
+ * "git index-pack" had a buffer-overflow while preparing an
+ informational message when the translated version of it was too
+ long.
+
+ * 'git commit -m "$msg"' used to add an extra newline even when
+ $msg already ended with one.
+
+ * The SSL peer verification done by "git imap-send" did not ask for
+ Server Name Indication (RFC 4366), failing to connect SSL/TLS
+ sites that serve multiple hostnames on a single IP.
+
+ * perl/Git.pm::cat_blob slurped everything in core only to write it
+ out to a file descriptor, which was not a very smart thing to do.
+
+ * "git branch" did not bother to check nonsense command line
+ parameters and issue errors in many cases.
+
+ * Verification of signed tags were not done correctly when not in C
+ or en/US locale.
+
+ * Some platforms and users spell UTF-8 differently; retry with the
+ most official "UTF-8" when the system does not understand the
+ user-supplied encoding name that are the common alternative
+ spellings of UTF-8.
+
+ * When export-subst is used, "zip" output recorded incorrect
+ size of the file.
+
+ * "git am $maildir/" applied messages in an unexpected order; sort
+ filenames read from the maildir/ in a way that is more likely to
+ sort messages in the order the writing MUA meant to, by sorting
+ numeric segment in numeric order and non-numeric segment in
+ alphabetical order.
+
+ * "git submodule update", when recursed into sub-submodules, did not
+ acccumulate the prefix paths.