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.
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.
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
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.