--- /dev/null
+Git v2.9.4 Release Notes
+========================
+
+Fixes since v2.9.3
+------------------
+
+ * There are certain house-keeping tasks that need to be performed at
+ the very beginning of any Git program, and programs that are not
+ built-in commands had to do them exactly the same way as "git"
+ potty does. It was easy to make mistakes in one-off standalone
+ programs (like test helpers). A common "main()" function that
+ calls cmd_main() of individual program has been introduced to
+ make it harder to make mistakes.
+
+ * "git merge" with renormalization did not work well with
+ merge-recursive, due to "safer crlf" conversion kicking in when it
+ shouldn't.
+
+ * The reflog output format is documented better, and a new format
+ --date=unix to report the seconds-since-epoch (without timezone)
+ has been added.
+
+ * "git push --force-with-lease" already had enough logic to allow
+ ensuring that such a push results in creation of a ref (i.e. the
+ receiving end did not have another push from sideways that would be
+ discarded by our force-pushing), but didn't expose this possibility
+ to the users. It does so now.
+
+ * "import-tars" fast-import script (in contrib/) used to ignore a
+ hardlink target and replaced it with an empty file, which has been
+ corrected to record the same blob as the other file the hardlink is
+ shared with.
+
+ * "git mv dir non-existing-dir/" did not work in some environments
+ the same way as existing mainstream platforms. The code now moves
+ "dir" to "non-existing-dir", without relying on rename("A", "B/")
+ that strips the trailing slash of '/'.
+
+ * The "t/" hierarchy is prone to get an unusual pathname; "make test"
+ has been taught to make sure they do not contain paths that cannot
+ be checked out on Windows (and the mechanism can be reusable to
+ catch pathnames that are not portable to other platforms as need
+ arises).
+
+ * When "git merge-recursive" works on history with many criss-cross
+ merges in "verbose" mode, the names the command assigns to the
+ virtual merge bases could have overwritten each other by unintended
+ reuse of the same piece of memory.
+
+ * "git checkout --detach <branch>" used to give the same advice
+ message as that is issued when "git checkout <tag>" (or anything
+ that is not a branch name) is given, but asking with "--detach" is
+ an explicit enough sign that the user knows what is going on. The
+ advice message has been squelched in this case.
+
+ * "git difftool" by default ignores the error exit from the backend
+ commands it spawns, because often they signal that they found
+ differences by exiting with a non-zero status code just like "diff"
+ does; the exit status codes 126 and above however are special in
+ that they are used to signal that the command is not executable,
+ does not exist, or killed by a signal. "git difftool" has been
+ taught to notice these exit status codes.
+
+ * On Windows, help.browser configuration variable used to be ignored,
+ which has been corrected.
+
+ * The "git -c var[=val] cmd" facility to append a configuration
+ variable definition at the end of the search order was described in
+ git(1) manual page, but not in git-config(1), which was more likely
+ place for people to look for when they ask "can I make a one-shot
+ override, and if so how?"
+
+ * The tempfile (hence its user lockfile) API lets the caller to open
+ a file descriptor to a temporary file, write into it and then
+ finalize it by first closing the filehandle and then either
+ removing or renaming the temporary file. When the process spawns a
+ subprocess after obtaining the file descriptor, and if the
+ subprocess has not exited when the attempt to remove or rename is
+ made, the last step fails on Windows, because the subprocess has
+ the file descriptor still open. Open tempfile with O_CLOEXEC flag
+ to avoid this (on Windows, this is mapped to O_NOINHERIT).
+
+Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.