configuration (when available), which allows --list-cmds to honour
a repository specific setting of completion.commands, for example.
+ * "git mergetool" learned to offer Sublime Merge (smerge) as one of
+ its backends.
+
+ * A new hook "post-index-change" is called when the on-disk index
+ file changes, which can help e.g. a virtualized working tree
+ implementation.
+
+ * "git difftool" can now run outside a repository.
+
+ * "git checkout -m <other>" was about carrying the differences
+ between HEAD and the working-tree files forward while checking out
+ another branch, and ignored the differences between HEAD and the
+ index. The command has been taught to abort when the index and the
+ HEAD are different.
+
+ * A progress indicator has been added to the "index-pack" step, which
+ often makes users wait for completion during "git clone".
+
+ * "git submodule" learns "set-branch" subcommand that allows the
+ submodule.*.branch settings to be modified.
+
+ * "git merge-recursive" backend recently learned a new heuristics to
+ infer file movement based on how other files in the same directory
+ moved. As this is inherently less robust heuristics than the one
+ based on the content similarity of the file itself (rather than
+ based on what its neighbours are doing), it sometimes gives an
+ outcome unexpected by the end users. This has been toned down to
+ leave the renamed paths in higher/conflicted stages in the index so
+ that the user can examine and confirm the result.
+
+ * "git tag" learned to give an advice suggesting it might be a
+ mistake when creating an annotated or signed tag that points at
+ another tag.
+
+ * The "git pack-objects" command learned to report the number of
+ objects it packed via the trace2 mechanism.
+
+ * The list of conflicted paths shown in the editor while concluding a
+ conflicted merge was shown above the scissors line when the
+ clean-up mode is set to "scissors", even though it was commented
+ out just like the list of updated paths and other information to
+ help the user explain the merge better.
+
+ * The trace2 tracing facility learned to auto-generate a filename
+ when told to log to a directory.
+
+ * "git clone" learned a new --server-option option when talking over
+ the protocol version 2.
+
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
* "git multi-pack-index verify" did not scale well with the number of
packfiles, which is being improved.
+ * "git stash" has been rewritten in C.
+
+ * The "check-docs" Makefile target to support developers has been
+ updated.
+
+ * The tests have been updated not to rely on the abbreviated option
+ names the parse-options API offers, to protect us from an
+ abbreviated form of an option that used to be unique within the
+ command getting non-unique when a new option that share the same
+ prefix is added.
+
+ * The scripted version of "git rebase -i" wrote and rewrote the todo
+ list many times during a single step of its operation, and the
+ recent C-rewrite made a faithful conversion of the logic to C. The
+ implementation has been updated to carry necessary information
+ around in-core to avoid rewriting the same file over and over
+ unnecessarily.
+
+ * Test framework update to more robustly clean up leftover files and
+ processes after tests are done.
+
+ * Conversion from unsigned char[20] to struct object_id continues.
+
+ * While running "git diff" in a lazy clone, we can upfront know which
+ missing blobs we will need, instead of waiting for the on-demand
+ machinery to discover them one by one. The code learned to aim to
+ achieve better performance by batching the request for these
+ promised blobs.
+
Fixes since v2.21
-----------------
* A corner-case object name ambiguity while the sequencer machinery
is working (e.g. "rebase -i -x") has been fixed.
- * "git format-patch" used overwrite an existing patch/cover-letter
- file. A new "--no-clobber" option stops it.
+ * "git format-patch" did not diagnose an error while opening the
+ output file for the cover-letter, which has been corrected.
(merge 2fe95f494c jc/format-patch-error-check later to maint).
* "git checkout -f <branch>" while the index has an unmerged path
* dumb-http walker has been updated to share more error recovery
strategy with the normal codepath.
+ * A buglet in configuration parser has been fixed.
+ (merge 19e7fdaa58 nd/include-if-wildmatch later to maint).
+
+ * The documentation for "git read-tree --reset -u" has been updated.
+ (merge b5a0bd694c nd/read-tree-reset-doc later to maint).
+
+ * Code clean-up around a much-less-important-than-it-used-to-be
+ update_server_info() funtion.
+ (merge b3223761c8 jk/server-info-rabbit-hole later to maint).
+
+ * The message given when "git commit -a <paths>" errors out has been
+ updated.
+ (merge 5a1dbd48bc nd/commit-a-with-paths-msg-update later to maint).
+
+ * "git cherry-pick --options A..B", after giving control back to the
+ user to ask help resolving a conflicted step, did not honor the
+ options it originally received, which has been corrected.
+
+ * Various glitches in "git gc" around reflog handling have been fixed.
+
+ * The code to read from commit-graph file has been cleanup with more
+ careful error checking before using data read from it.
+
+ * Performance fix around "git fetch" that grabs many refs.
+ (merge b764300912 jt/fetch-pack-wanted-refs-optim later to maint).
+
+ * Protocol v2 support in "git fetch-pack" of shallow clones has been
+ corrected.
+
+ * Performance fix around "git blame", especially in a linear history
+ (which is the norm we should optimize for).
+ (merge f892014943 dk/blame-keep-origin-blob later to maint).
+
+ * Performance fix for "rev-list --parents -- pathspec".
+ (merge 8320b1dbe7 jk/revision-rewritten-parents-in-prio-queue later to maint).
+
+ * Updating the display with progress message has been cleaned up to
+ deal better with overlong messages.
+ (merge 545dc345eb sg/overlong-progress-fix later to maint).
+
+ * "git blame -- path" in a non-bare repository starts blaming from
+ the working tree, and the same command in a bare repository errors
+ out because there is no working tree by definition. The command
+ has been taught to instead start blaming from the commit at HEAD,
+ which is more useful.
+ (merge a544fb08f8 sg/blame-in-bare-start-at-head later to maint).
+
+ * An underallocation in the code to read the untracked cache
+ extension has been corrected.
+ (merge 3a7b45a623 js/untracked-cache-allocfix later to maint).
+
+ * The code is updated to check the result of memory allocation before
+ it is used in more places, by using xmalloc and/or xcalloc calls.
+ (merge 999b951b28 jk/xmalloc later to maint).
+
+ * The GETTEXT_POISON test option has been quite broken ever since it
+ was made runtime-tunable, which has been fixed.
+ (merge f88b9cb603 jc/gettext-test-fix later to maint).
+
+ * Test fix on APFS that is incapable of store paths in Latin-1.
+ (merge 3889149619 js/iso8895-test-on-apfs later to maint).
+
+ * "git submodule foreach <command> --quiet" did not pass the option
+ down correctly, which has been corrected.
+ (merge a282f5a906 nd/submodule-foreach-quiet later to maint).
+
+ * "git send-email" has been taught to use quoted-printable when the
+ payload contains carriage-return. The use of the mechanism is in
+ line with the design originally added the codepath that chooses QP
+ when the payload has overly long lines.
+ (merge 74d76a1701 bc/send-email-qp-cr later to maint).
+
+ * The recently added feature to add addresses that are on
+ anything-by: trailers in 'git send-email' was found to be way too
+ eager and considered nonsense strings as if they can be legitimate
+ beginning of *-by: trailer. This has been tightened.
+
+ * Builds with gettext broke on recent macOS w/ Homebrew, which
+ seems to have stopped including from /usr/local/include; this
+ has been corrected.
+ (merge 92a1377a2a js/macos-gettext-build later to maint).
+
+ * Running "git add" on a repository created inside the current
+ repository is an explicit indication that the user wants to add it
+ as a submodule, but when the HEAD of the inner repository is on an
+ unborn branch, it cannot be added as a submodule. Worse, the files
+ in its working tree can be added as if they are a part of the outer
+ repository, which is not what the user wants. These problems are
+ being addressed.
+ (merge f937bc2f86 km/empty-repo-is-still-a-repo later to maint).
+
+ * "git cherry-pick" run with the "-x" or the "--signoff" option used
+ to (and more importantly, ought to) clean up the commit log message
+ with the --cleanup=space option by default, but this has been
+ broken since late 2017. This has been fixed.
+
+ * When given a tag that points at a commit-ish, "git replace --graft"
+ failed to peel the tag before writing a replace ref, which did not
+ make sense because the old graft mechanism the feature wants to
+ mimick only allowed to replace one commit object with another.
+ This has been fixed.
+ (merge ee521ec4cb cc/replace-graft-peel-tags later to maint).
+
+ * Code tightening against a "wrong" object appearing where an object
+ of a different type is expected, instead of blindly assuming that
+ the connection between objects are correctly made.
+ (merge 97dd512af7 tb/unexpected later to maint).
+
+ * An earlier update for MinGW and Cygwin accidentally broke MSVC build,
+ which has been fixed.
+ (merge 22c3634c0f ss/msvc-path-utils-fix later to maint).
+
+ * %(push:track) token used in the --format option to "git
+ for-each-ref" and friends was not showing the right branch, which
+ has been fixed.
+ (merge c646d0934e dr/ref-filter-push-track-fix later to maint).
+
+ * "make check-docs", "git help -a", etc. did not account for cases
+ where a particular build may deliberately omit some subcommands,
+ which has been corrected.
+
+ * The logic to tell if a Git repository has a working tree protects
+ "git branch -D" from removing the branch that is currently checked
+ out by mistake. The implementation of this logic was broken for
+ repositories with unusual name, which unfortunately is the norm for
+ submodules these days. This has been fixed.
+ (merge f3534c98e4 jt/submodule-repo-is-with-worktree later to maint).
+
+ * AIX shared the same build issues with other BSDs around fileno(fp),
+ which has been corrected.
+ (merge ee662bf5c6 cc/aix-has-fileno-as-a-macro later to maint).
+
+ * The autoconf generated configure script failed to use the right
+ gettext() implementations from -libintl by ignoring useless stub
+ implementations shipped in some C library, which has been
+ corrected.
+ (merge b71e56a683 vk/autoconf-gettext later to maint).
+
* Code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc.
(merge 11f470aee7 jc/test-yes-doc later to maint).
(merge 90503a240b js/doc-symref-in-proto-v1 later to maint).
(merge a7256debd4 nd/checkout-m-doc-update later to maint).
(merge 3a9e1ad78d jt/t5551-protocol-v2-does-not-have-half-auth later to maint).
(merge 0b918b75af sg/t5318-cleanup later to maint).
+ (merge 68ed71b53c cb/doco-mono later to maint).
+ (merge a34dca2451 nd/interpret-trailers-docfix later to maint).
+ (merge cf7b857a77 en/fast-import-parsing-fix later to maint).
+ (merge fe61ccbc35 po/rerere-doc-fmt later to maint).
+ (merge ffea0248bf po/describe-not-necessarily-7 later to maint).
+ (merge 7cb7283adb tg/ls-files-debug-format-fix later to maint).
+ (merge f64a21bd82 tz/doc-apostrophe-no-longer-needed later to maint).
+ (merge dbe7b41019 js/t3301-unbreak-notes-test later to maint).
+ (merge d8083e4180 km/t3000-retitle later to maint).
+ (merge 9e4cbccbd7 tz/git-svn-doc-markup-fix later to maint).