Git Changelog

What's new in Git 2.33.0

Oct 13, 2021

UI, Workflows & Features:
"git send-email" learned the "--sendmail-cmd" command line option and the "sendemail.sendmailCmd" configuration variable, which is a more sensible approach than the current way of repurposing the "smtp-server" that is meant to name the server to instead name the command to talk to the server.
The userdiff pattern for C# learned the token "record".
"git rev-list" learns to omit the "commit " header lines from the output with the `--no-commit-header` option.
"git worktree add --lock" learned to record why the worktree is locked with a custom message.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
The code to handle the "--format" option in "for-each-ref" and friends made too many string comparisons on %(atom)s used in the format string, which has been corrected by converting them into enum when the format string is parsed.
Use the hashfile API in the codepath that writes the index file to reduce code duplication.
Repeated rename detections in a sequence of mergy operations have been optimized out for the 'ort' merge strategy.
Preliminary clean-up of tests before the main reftable changes hits the codebase.
The backend for "diff -G/-S" has been updated to use pcre2 engine when available.
Use ".DELETE_ON_ERROR" pseudo target to simplify our Makefile.
Code cleanup around struct_type_init() functions.
"git send-email" optimization.
GitHub Actions / CI update. (merge 0dc787a9f2 js/ci-windows-update later to maint).
Object accesses in repositories with many alternate object store have been optimized.
"git log" has been optimized not to waste cycles to load ref decoration data that may not be needed.
Many "printf"-like helper functions we have have been annotated with __attribute__() to catch placeholder/parameter mismatches.
Tests that cover protocol bits have been updated and helpers used there have been consolidated.
The CI gained a new job to run "make sparse" check.
"git status" codepath learned to work with sparsely populated index without hydrating it fully.
A guideline for gender neutral documentation has been added.
Documentation on "git diff -l" and diff.renameLimit have been updated, and the defaults for these limits have been raised.
The completion support used to offer alternate spelling of options that exist only for compatibility, which has been corrected.
"TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY=there make test" failed to work, which has been corrected.
"git bundle" gained more test coverage.
"git read-tree" had a codepath where blobs are fetched one-by-one from the promisor remote, which has been corrected to fetch in bulk.
Rewrite of "git submodule" in C continues.
"git checkout" and "git commit" learn to work without unnecessarily expanding sparse indexes.
Fixes:
We historically rejected a very short string as an author name while accepting a patch e-mail, which has been loosened. (merge 72ee47ceeb ef/mailinfo-short-name later to maint).
The parallel checkout codepath did not initialize object ID field used to talk to the worker processes in a futureproof way.
Rewrite code that triggers undefined behaviour warning. (merge aafa5df0df jn/size-t-casted-to-off-t-fix later to maint).
The description of "fast-forward" in the glossary has been updated. (merge e22f2daed0 ry/clarify-fast-forward-in-glossary later to maint).
Recent "git clone" left a temporary directory behind when the transport layer returned an failure. (merge 6aacb7d861 jk/clone-clean-upon-transport-error later to maint).
"git fetch" over protocol v2 left its side of the socket open after it finished speaking, which unnecessarily wasted the resource on the other side. (merge ae1a7eefff jk/fetch-pack-v2-half-close-early later to maint).
The command line completion (in contrib/) learned that "git diff" takes the "--anchored" option. (merge d1e7c2cac9 tb/complete-diff-anchored later to maint).
"git-svn" tests assumed that "locale -a", which is used to pick an available UTF-8 locale, is available everywhere. A knob has been introduced to allow testers to specify a suitable locale to use. (merge 482c962de4 dd/svn-test-wo-locale-a later to maint).
Update "git subtree" to work better on Windows. (merge 77f37de39f js/subtree-on-windows-fix later to maint).
Remove multimail from contrib/ (merge f74d11471f js/no-more-multimail later to maint).
Make the codebase MSAN clean. (merge 4dbc55e87d ah/uninitialized-reads-fix later to maint).
Work around inefficient glob substitution in older versions of bash by rewriting parts of a test. (merge eb87c6f559 jx/t6020-with-older-bash later to maint).
Avoid duplicated work while building reachability bitmaps. (merge aa9ad6fee5 jk/bitmap-tree-optim later to maint).
We broke "GIT_SKIP_TESTS=t?000" to skip certain tests in recent update, which got fixed.
The side-band demultiplexer that is used to display progress output from the remote end did not clear the line properly when the end of line hits at a packet boundary, which has been corrected.
Some test scripts assumed that readlink(1) was universally installed and available, which is not the case. (merge 7c0afdf23c jk/test-without-readlink-1 later to maint).
Recent update to completion script (in contrib/) broke those who use the __git_complete helper to define completion to their custom command. (merge cea232194d fw/complete-cmd-idx-fix later to maint).
Output from some of our tests were affected by the width of the terminal that they were run in, which has been corrected by exporting a fixed value in the COLUMNS environment. (merge c49a177bec ab/fix-columns-to-80-during-tests later to maint).
On Windows, mergetool has been taught to find kdiff3.exe just like it finds winmerge.exe. (merge 47eb4c6890 ms/mergetools-kdiff3-on-windows later to maint).
When we cannot figure out how wide the terminal is, we use a fallback value of 80 ourselves (which cannot be avoided), but when we run the pager, we export it in COLUMNS, which forces the pager to use the hardcoded value, even when the pager is perfectly capable to figure it out itself. Stop exporting COLUMNS when we fall back on the hardcoded default value for our own use. (merge 9b6e2c8b98 js/stop-exporting-bogus-columns later to maint).
"git cat-file --batch-all-objects"" misbehaved when "--batch" is in use and did not ask for certain object traits. (merge ee02ac6164 zh/cat-file-batch-fix later to maint).
Some code and doc clarification around "git push".
The "union" conflict resultion variant misbehaved when used with binary merge driver. (merge 382b601acd jk/union-merge-binary later to maint).
Prevent "git p4" from failing to submit changes to binary file. (merge 54662d5958 dc/p4-binary-submit-fix later to maint).
"git grep --and -e foo" ought to have been diagnosed as an error but instead segfaulted, which has been corrected. (merge fe7fe62d8d rs/grep-parser-fix later to maint).
The merge code had funny interactions between content based rename detection and directory rename detection. (merge 3585d0ea23 en/merge-dir-rename-corner-case-fix later to maint).
When rebuilding the multi-pack index file reusing an existing one, we used to blindly trust the existing file and ended up carrying corrupted data into the updated file, which has been corrected. (merge f89ecf7988 tb/midx-use-checksum later to maint).
Update the location of system-side configuration file on Windows. (merge e355307692 js/gfw-system-config-loc-fix later to maint).
Code recently added to support common ancestry negotiation during "git push" did not sanity check its arguments carefully enough. (merge eff40457a4 ab/fetch-negotiate-segv-fix later to maint).
Update the documentation not to assume users are of certain gender and adds to guidelines to do so. (merge 46a237f42f ds/gender-neutral-doc later to maint).
"git commit --allow-empty-message" won't abort the operation upon an empty message, but the hint shown in the editor said otherwise. (merge 6f70f00b4f hj/commit-allow-empty-message later to maint).
The code that gives an error message in "git multi-pack-index" when no subcommand is given tried to print a NULL pointer as a strong, which has been corrected. (merge 88617d11f9 tb/reverse-midx later to maint).
CI update. (merge a066a90db6 js/ci-check-whitespace-updates later to maint).
Documentation fix for "git pull --rebase=no". (merge d3236becec fc/pull-no-rebase-merges-theirs-into-ours later to maint).
A race between repacking and using pack bitmaps has been corrected. (merge dc1daacdcc jk/check-pack-valid-before-opening-bitmap later to maint).
The local changes stashed by "git merge --autostash" were lost when the merge failed in certain ways, which has been corrected.
Windows rmdir() equivalent behaves differently from POSIX ones in that when used on a symbolic link that points at a directory, the target directory gets removed, which has been corrected. (merge 3e7d4888e5 tb/mingw-rmdir-symlink-to-directory later to maint).
Other code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc.:
(merge bfe35a6165 ah/doc-describe later to maint).
(merge f302c1e4aa jc/clarify-revision-range later to maint).
(merge 3127ff90ea tl/fix-packfile-uri-doc later to maint).
(merge a84216c684 jk/doc-color-pager later to maint).
(merge 4e0a64a713 ab/trace2-squelch-gcc-warning later to maint).
(merge 225f7fa847 ps/rev-list-object-type-filter later to maint).
(merge 5317dfeaed dd/honor-users-tar-in-tests later to maint).
(merge ace6d8e3d6 tk/partial-clone-repack-doc later to maint).
(merge 7ba68e0cf1 js/trace2-discard-event-docfix later to maint).
(merge 8603c419d3 fc/doc-default-to-upstream-config later to maint).
(merge 1d72b604ef jk/revision-squelch-gcc-warning later to maint).
(merge abcb66c614 ar/typofix later to maint).
(merge 9853830787 ah/graph-typofix later to maint).
(merge aac578492d ab/config-hooks-path-testfix later to maint).
(merge 98c7656a18 ar/more-typofix later to maint).
(merge 6fb9195f6c jk/doc-max-pack-size later to maint).
(merge 4184cbd635 ar/mailinfo-memcmp-to-skip-prefix later to maint).
(merge 91d2347033 ar/doc-libera-chat-in-my-first-contrib later to maint).
(merge 338abb0f04 ab/cmd-foo-should-return later to maint).
(merge 546096a5cb ab/xdiff-bug-cleanup later to maint).
(merge b7b793d1e7 ab/progress-cleanup later to maint).
(merge d94f9b8e90 ba/object-info later to maint).
(merge 52ff891c03 ar/test-code-cleanup later to maint).
(merge a0538e5c8b dd/document-log-decorate-default later to maint).
(merge ce24797d38 mr/cmake later to maint).
(merge 9eb542f2ee ab/pre-auto-gc-hook-test later to maint).
(merge 9fffc38583 bk/doc-commit-typofix later to maint).
(merge 1cf823d8f0 ks/submodule-cleanup later to maint).
(merge ebbf5d2b70 js/config-mak-windows-pcre-fix later to maint).
(merge 617480d75b hn/refs-iterator-peel-returns-boolean later to maint).
(merge 6a24cc71ed ar/submodule-helper-include-cleanup later to maint).
(merge 5632e838f8 rs/khash-alloc-cleanup later to maint).
(merge b1d87fbaf1 jk/typofix later to maint).
(merge e04170697a ab/gitignore-discovery-doc later to maint).
(merge 8232a0ff48 dl/packet-read-response-end-fix later to maint).
(merge eb448631fb dl/diff-merge-base later to maint).
(merge c510928a25 hn/refs-debug-empty-prefix later to maint).
(merge ddcb189d9d tb/bitmap-type-filter-comment-fix later to maint).
(merge 878b399734 pb/submodule-recurse-doc later to maint).
(merge 734283855f jk/config-env-doc later to maint).
(merge 482e1488a9 ab/getcwd-test later to maint).
(merge f0b922473e ar/doc-markup-fix later to maint).

New in Git 2.32.0 (Jul 22, 2021)

Updates:
UI, Workflows & Features:
It does not make sense to make ".gitattributes", ".gitignore" and ".mailmap" symlinks, as they are supposed to be usable from the object store (think: bare repositories where HEAD:.mailmap etc. are used). When these files are symbolic links, we used to read the contents of the files pointed by them by mistake, which has been corrected.
"git stash show" learned to optionally show untracked part of the stash.
"git log --format='...'" learned "%(describe)" placeholder.
"git repack" so far has been only capable of repacking everything under the sun into a single pack (or split by size). A cleverer strategy to reduce the cost of repacking a repository has been introduced.
The http codepath learned to let the credential layer to cache the password used to unlock a certificate that has successfully been used.
"git commit --fixup=", which was to tweak the changes made to the contents while keeping the original log message intact, learned "--fixup=(amend|reword):", that can be used to tweak both the message and the contents, and only the message, respectively.
"git send-email" learned to honor the core.hooksPath configuration.
"git format-patch -v" learned to allow a reroll count that is not an integer.
"git commit" learned "--trailer [=]" option; together with the interpret-trailers command, this will make it easier to support custom trailers.
"git clone --reject-shallow" option fails the clone as soon as we notice that we are cloning from a shallow repository.
A configuration variable has been added to force tips of certain refs to be given a reachability bitmap.
"gitweb" learned "e-mail privacy" feature to redact strings that look like e-mail addresses on various pages.
"git apply --3way" has always been "to fall back to 3-way merge only when straight application fails". Swap the order of falling back so that 3-way is always attempted first (only when the option is given, of course) and then straight patch application is used as a fallback when it fails.
"git apply" now takes "--3way" and "--cached" at the same time, and work and record results only in the index.
The command line completion (in contrib/) has learned that CHERRY_PICK_HEAD is a possible pseudo-ref.
Userdiff patterns for "Scheme" has been added.
"git log" learned "--diff-merges=" option, with an associated configuration variable log.diffMerges.
"git log --format=..." placeholders learned %ah/%ch placeholders to request the --date=human output.
Replace GIT_CONFIG_NOSYSTEM mechanism to decline from reading the system-wide configuration file with GIT_CONFIG_SYSTEM that lets users specify from which file to read the system-wide configuration (setting it to an empty file would essentially be the same as setting NOSYSTEM), and introduce GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL to override the per-user configuration in $HOME/.gitconfig.
"git add" and "git rm" learned not to touch those paths that are outside of sparse checkout.
"git rev-list" learns the "--filter=object:type=" option, which can be used to exclude objects of the given kind from the packfile generated by pack-objects.
The command line completion (in contrib/) for "git stash" has been updated.
"git subtree" updates.
It is now documented that "format-patch" skips merges.
Options to "git pack-objects" that take numeric values like --window and --depth should not accept negative values; the input validation has been tightened.
The way the command line specified by the trailer..command configuration variable receives the end-user supplied value was both error prone and misleading. An alternative to achieve the same goal in a safer and more intuitive way has been added, as the trailer..cmd configuration variable, to replace it.
"git add -i --dry-run" does not dry-run, which was surprising. The combination of options has taught to error out.
"git push" learns to discover common ancestor with the receiving end over protocol v2. This will hopefully make "git push" as efficient as "git fetch" in avoiding objects from getting transferred unnecessarily.
"git mailinfo" (hence "git am") learned the "--quoted-cr" option to control how lines ending with CRLF wrapped in base64 or qp are handled.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
Rename detection rework continues.
GIT_TEST_FAIL_PREREQS is a mechanism to skip test pieces with prerequisites to catch broken tests that depend on the side effects of optional pieces, but did not work at all when negative prerequisites were involved. (merge 27d578d904 jk/fail-prereq-testfix later to maint).
"git diff-index" codepath has been taught to trust fsmonitor status to reduce number of lstat() calls. (merge 7e5aa13d2c nk/diff-index-fsmonitor later to maint).
Reorganize Makefile to allow building git.o and other essential objects without extra stuff needed only for testing.
Preparatory API changes for parallel checkout.
A simple IPC interface gets introduced to build services like fsmonitor on top.
Fsck API clean-up.
SECURITY.md that is facing individual contributors and end users has been introduced. Also a procedure to follow when preparing embargoed releases has been spelled out. (merge 09420b7648 js/security-md later to maint).
Optimize "rev-list --use-bitmap-index --objects" corner case that uses negative tags as the stopping points.
CMake update for vsbuild.
An on-disk reverse-index to map the in-pack location of an object back to its object name across multiple packfiles is introduced.
Generate [ec]tags under $(QUIET_GEN).
Clean-up codepaths that implements "git send-email --validate" option and improves the message from it.
The last remnant of gettext-poison has been removed.
The test framework has been taught to optionally turn the default merge strategy to "ort" throughout the system where we use three-way merges internally, like cherry-pick, rebase etc., primarily to enhance its test coverage (the strategy has been available as an explicit "-s ort" choice).
A bit of code clean-up and a lot of test clean-up around userdiff area.
Handling of "promisor packs" that allows certain objects to be missing and lazily retrievable has been optimized (a bit).
When packet_write() fails, we gave an extra error message unnecessarily, which has been corrected.
The checkout machinery has been taught to perform the actual write-out of the files in parallel when able.
Show errno in the trace output in the error codepath that calls read_raw_ref method.
Effort to make the command line completion (in contrib/) safe with "set -u" continues.
Tweak a few tests for "log --format=..." that show timestamps in various formats.
The reflog expiry machinery has been taught to emit trace events.
Over-the-wire protocol learns a new request type to ask for object sizes given a list of object names.
Fixes:
The fsmonitor interface read from its input without making sure there is something to read from. This bug is new in 2.31 timeframe.
The data structure used by fsmonitor interface was not properly duplicated during an in-core merge, leading to use-after-free etc.
"git bisect" reimplemented more in C during 2.30 timeframe did not take an annotated tag as a good/bad endpoint well. This regression has been corrected.
Fix macros that can silently inject unintended null-statements.
CALLOC_ARRAY() macro replaces many uses of xcalloc().
Update insn in Makefile comments to run fuzz-all target.
Fix a corner case bug in "git mv" on case insensitive systems, which was introduced in 2.29 timeframe.
We had a code to diagnose and die cleanly when a required clean/smudge filter is missing, but an assert before that unnecessarily fired, hiding the end-user facing die() message. (merge 6fab35f748 mt/cleanly-die-upon-missing-required-filter later to maint).
Update C code that sets a few configuration variables when a remote is configured so that it spells configuration variable names in the canonical camelCase. (merge 0f1da600e6 ab/remote-write-config-in-camel-case later to maint).
A new configuration variable has been introduced to allow choosing which version of the generation number gets used in the commit-graph file. (merge 702110aac6 ds/commit-graph-generation-config later to maint).
Perf test update to work better in secondary worktrees. (merge 36e834abc1 jk/perf-in-worktrees later to maint).
Updates to memory allocation code around the use of pcre2 library. (merge c1760352e0 ab/grep-pcre2-allocfix later to maint).
"git -c core.bare=false clone --bare ..." would have segfaulted, which has been corrected. (merge 75555676ad bc/clone-bare-with-conflicting-config later to maint).
When "git checkout" removes a path that does not exist in the commit it is checking out, it wasn't careful enough not to follow symbolic links, which has been corrected. (merge fab78a0c3d mt/checkout-remove-nofollow later to maint).
A few option description strings started with capital letters, which were corrected. (merge 5ee90326dc cc/downcase-opt-help later to maint).
Plug or annotate remaining leaks that trigger while running the very basic set of tests. (merge 68ffe095a2 ah/plugleaks later to maint).
The hashwrite() API uses a buffering mechanism to avoid calling write(2) too frequently. This logic has been refactored to be easier to understand. (merge ddaf1f62e3 ds/clarify-hashwrite later to maint).
"git cherry-pick/revert" with or without "--[no-]edit" did not spawn the editor as expected (e.g. "revert --no-edit" after a conflict still asked to edit the message), which has been corrected. (merge 39edfd5cbc en/sequencer-edit-upon-conflict-fix later to maint).
"git daemon" has been tightened against systems that take backslash as directory separator. (merge 9a7f1ce8b7 rs/daemon-sanitize-dir-sep later to maint).
A NULL-dereference bug has been corrected in an error codepath in "git for-each-ref", "git branch --list" etc. (merge c685450880 jk/ref-filter-segfault-fix later to maint).
Streamline the codepath to fix the UTF-8 encoding issues in the argv[] and the prefix on macOS. (merge c7d0e61016 tb/precompose-prefix-simplify later to maint).
The command-line completion script (in contrib/) had a couple of references that would have given a warning under the "-u" (nounset) option. (merge c5c0548d79 vs/completion-with-set-u later to maint).
When "git pack-objects" makes a literal copy of a part of existing packfile using the reachability bitmaps, its update to the progress meter was broken. (merge 8e118e8490 jk/pack-objects-bitmap-progress-fix later to maint).
The dependencies for config-list.h and command-list.h were broken when the former was split out of the latter, which has been corrected. (merge 56550ea718 sg/bugreport-fixes later to maint).
"git push --quiet --set-upstream" was not quiet when setting the upstream branch configuration, which has been corrected. (merge f3cce896a8 ow/push-quiet-set-upstream later to maint).
The prefetch task in "git maintenance" assumed that "git fetch" from any remote would fetch all its local branches, which would fetch too much if the user is interested in only a subset of branches there. (merge 32f67888d8 ds/maintenance-prefetch-fix later to maint).
Clarify that pathnames recorded in Git trees are most often (but not necessarily) encoded in UTF-8. (merge 9364bf465d ab/pathname-encoding-doc later to maint).
"git --config-env var=val cmd" weren't accepted (only --config-env=var=val was). (merge c331551ccf ps/config-env-option-with-separate-value later to maint).
When the reachability bitmap is in effect, the "do not lose recently created objects and those that are reachable from them" safety to protect us from races were disabled by mistake, which has been corrected. (merge 2ba582ba4c jk/prune-with-bitmap-fix later to maint).
Cygwin pathname handling fix. (merge bccc37fdc7 ad/cygwin-no-backslashes-in-paths later to maint).
"git rebase --[no-]reschedule-failed-exec" did not work well with its configuration variable, which has been corrected. (merge e5b32bffd1 ab/rebase-no-reschedule-failed-exec later to maint).
Portability fix for command line completion script (in contrib/). (merge f2acf763e2 si/zsh-complete-comment-fix later to maint).
"git repack -A -d" in a partial clone unnecessarily loosened objects in promisor pack.
"git bisect skip" when custom words are used for new/old did not work, which has been corrected.
A few variants of informational message "Already up-to-date" has been rephrased. (merge ad9322da03 js/merge-already-up-to-date-message-reword later to maint).
"git submodule update --quiet" did not propagate the quiet option down to underlying "git fetch", which has been corrected. (merge 62af4bdd42 nc/submodule-update-quiet later to maint).
Document that our test can use "local" keyword. (merge a84fd3bcc6 jc/test-allows-local later to maint).
The word-diff mode has been taught to work better with a word regexp that can match an empty string. (merge 0324e8fc6b pw/word-diff-zero-width-matches later to maint).
"git p4" learned to find branch points more efficiently. (merge 6b79818bfb jk/p4-locate-branch-point-optim later to maint).
When "git update-ref -d" removes a ref that is packed, it left empty directories under $GIT_DIR/refs/ for (merge 5f03e5126d wc/packed-ref-removal-cleanup later to maint).
"git clean" and "git ls-files -i" had confusion around working on or showing ignored paths inside an ignored directory, which has been corrected. (merge b548f0f156 en/dir-traversal later to maint).
The handling of "%(push)" formatting element of "for-each-ref" and friends was broken when the same codepath started handling "%(push:)", which has been corrected. (merge 1e1c4c5eac zh/ref-filter-push-remote-fix later to maint).
The bash prompt script (in contrib/) did not work under "set -u". (merge 5c0cbdb107 en/prompt-under-set-u later to maint).
The "chainlint" feature in the test framework is a handy way to catch common mistakes in writing new tests, but tends to get expensive. An knob to selectively disable it has been introduced to help running tests that the developer has not modified. (merge 2d86a96220 jk/test-chainlint-softer later to maint).
The "rev-parse" command did not diagnose the lack of argument to "--path-format" option, which was introduced in v2.31 era, which has been corrected. (merge 99fc555188 wm/rev-parse-path-format-wo-arg later to maint).
Other code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc:
(merge f451960708 dl/cat-file-doc-cleanup later to maint).
(merge 12604a8d0c sv/t9801-test-path-is-file-cleanup later to maint).
(merge ea7e63921c jr/doc-ignore-typofix later to maint).
(merge 23c781f173 ps/update-ref-trans-hook-doc later to maint).
(merge 42efa1231a jk/filter-branch-sha256 later to maint).
(merge 4c8e3dca6e tb/push-simple-uses-branch-merge-config later to maint).
(merge 6534d436a2 bs/asciidoctor-installation-hints later to maint).
(merge 47957485b3 ab/read-tree later to maint).
(merge 2be927f3d1 ab/diff-no-index-tests later to maint).
(merge 76593c09bb ab/detox-gettext-tests later to maint).
(merge 28e29ee38b jc/doc-format-patch-clarify later to maint).
(merge fc12b6fdde fm/user-manual-use-preface later to maint).
(merge dba94e3a85 cc/test-helper-bloom-usage-fix later to maint).
(merge 61a7660516 hn/reftable-tables-doc-update later to maint).
(merge 81ed96a9b2 jt/fetch-pack-request-fix later to maint).
(merge 151b6c2dd7 jc/doc-do-not-capitalize-clarification later to maint).
(merge 9160068ac6 js/access-nul-emulation-on-windows later to maint).
(merge 7a14acdbe6 po/diff-patch-doc later to maint).
(merge f91371b948 pw/patience-diff-clean-up later to maint).
(merge 3a7f0908b6 mt/clean-clean later to maint).
(merge d4e2d15a8b ab/streaming-simplify later to maint).
(merge 0e59f7ad67 ah/merge-ort-i18n later to maint).
(merge e6f68f62e0 ls/typofix later to maint).

New in Git 2.31.0 (Mar 31, 2021)

Backward incompatible and other important changes:
The "pack-redundant" command, which has been left stale with almost unusable performance issues, now warns loudly when it gets used, as we no longer want to recommend its use (instead just "repack -d" instead).
The development community has adopted Contributor Covenant v2.0 to update from v1.4 that we have been using.
The support for deprecated PCRE1 library has been dropped.
Fixes for CVE-2021-21300 in Git 2.30.2 (and earlier) is included.
UI, Workflows & Features:
The "--format=%(trailers)" mechanism gets enhanced to make it easier to design output for machine consumption.
When a user does not tell "git pull" to use rebase or merge, the command gives a loud message telling a user to choose between rebase or merge but creates a merge anyway, forcing users who would want to rebase to redo the operation. Fix an early part of this problem by tightening the condition to give the message---there is no reason to stop or force the user to choose between rebase or merge if the history fast-forwards.
The configuration variable 'core.abbrev' can be set to 'no' to force no abbreviation regardless of the hash algorithm.
"git rev-parse" can be explicitly told to give output as absolute or relative path with the `--path-format=(absolute|relative)` option.
Bash completion (in contrib/) update to make it easier for end-users to add completion for their custom "git" subcommands.
"git maintenance" learned to drive scheduled maintenance on platforms whose native scheduling methods are not 'cron'.
After expiring a reflog and making a single commit, the reflog for the branch would record a single entry that knows both @{0} and @{1}, but we failed to answer "what commit were we on?", i.e. @{1}
"git bundle" learns "--stdin" option to read its refs from the standard input. Also, it now does not lose refs whey they point at the same object.
"git log" learned a new "--diff-merges=" option.
"git ls-files" can and does show multiple entries when the index is unmerged, which is a source for confusion unless -s/-u option is in use. A new option --deduplicate has been introduced.
`git worktree list` now annotates worktrees as prunable, shows locked and prunable attributes in --porcelain mode, and gained a --verbose option.
"git clone" tries to locally check out the branch pointed at by HEAD of the remote repository after it is done, but the protocol did not convey the information necessary to do so when copying an empty repository. The protocol v2 learned how to do so.
There are other ways than ".." for a single token to denote a "commit range", namely "^!" and "^-", but "git range-diff" did not understand them.
The "git range-diff" command learned "--(left|right)-only" option to show only one side of the compared range.
"git mergetool" feeds three versions (base, local and remote) of a conflicted path unmodified. The command learned to optionally prepare these files with unconflicted parts already resolved.
The .mailmap is documented to be read only from the root level of a working tree, but a stray file in a bare repository also was read by accident, which has been corrected.
"git maintenance" tool learned a new "pack-refs" maintenance task.
The error message given when a configuration variable that is expected to have a boolean value has been improved.
Signed commits and tags now allow verification of objects, whose two object names (one in SHA-1, the other in SHA-256) are both signed.
"git rev-list" command learned "--disk-usage" option.
"git {diff,log} --{skip,rotate}-to=" allows the user to discard diff output for early paths or move them to the end of the output.
"git difftool" learned "--skip-to=" option to restart an interrupted session from an arbitrary path.
"git grep" has been tweaked to be limited to the sparse checkout paths.
"git rebase --[no-]fork-point" gained a configuration variable rebase.forkPoint so that users do not have to keep specifying a non-default setting.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
A 3-year old test that was not testing anything useful has been corrected.
Retire more names with "sha1" in it.
The topological walk codepath is covered by new trace2 stats.
Update the Code-of-conduct to version 2.0 from the upstream (we've been using version 1.4).
"git mktag" validates its input using its own rules before writing a tag object---it has been updated to share the logic with "git fsck".
Two new ways to feed configuration variable-value pairs via environment variables have been introduced, and the way GIT_CONFIG_PARAMETERS encodes variable/value pairs has been tweaked to make it more robust.
Tests have been updated so that they do not to get affected by the name of the default branch "git init" creates.
"git fetch" learns to treat ref updates atomically in all-or-none fashion, just like "git push" does, with the new "--atomic" option.
The peel_ref() API has been replaced with peel_iterated_oid().
The .use_shell flag in struct child_process that is passed to run_command() API has been clarified with a bit more documentation.
Document, clean-up and optimize the code around the cache-tree extension in the index.
The ls-refs protocol operation has been optimized to narrow the sub-hierarchy of refs/ it walks to produce response.
When removing many branches and tags, the code used to do so one ref at a time. There is another API it can use to delete multiple refs, and it makes quite a lot of performance difference when the refs are packed.
The "pack-objects" command needs to iterate over all the tags when automatic tag following is enabled, but it actually iterated over all refs and then discarded everything outside "refs/tags/" hierarchy, which was quite wasteful.
A perf script was made more portable.
Our setting of GitHub CI test jobs were a bit too eager to give up once there is even one failure found. Tweak the knob to allow other jobs keep running even when we see a failure, so that we can find more failures in a single run.
We've carried compatibility codepaths for compilers without variadic macros for quite some time, but the world may be ready for them to be removed. Force compilation failure on exotic platforms where variadic macros are not available to find out who screams in such a way that we can easily revert if it turns out that the world is not yet ready.
Code clean-up to ensure our use of hashtables using object names as keys use the "struct object_id" objects, not the raw hash values.
Lose the debugging aid that may have been useful in the past, but no longer is, in the "grep" codepaths.
Some pretty-format specifiers do not need the data in commit object (e.g. "%H"), but we were over-eager to load and parse it, which has been made even lazier.
Get rid of "GETTEXT_POISON" support altogether, which may or may not be controversial.
Introduce an on-disk file to record revindex for packdata, which traditionally was always created on the fly and only in-core.
The commit-graph learned to use corrected commit dates instead of the generation number to help topological revision traversal.
Piecemeal of rewrite of "git bisect" in C continues.
When a pager spawned by us exited, the trace log did not record its exit status correctly, which has been corrected.
Removal of GIT_TEST_GETTEXT_POISON continues.
The code to implement "git merge-base --independent" was poorly done and was kept from the very beginning of the feature.
Preliminary changes to fsmonitor integration.
Performance improvements for rename detection.
The common code to deal with "chunked file format" that is shared by the multi-pack-index and commit-graph files have been factored out, to help codepaths for both filetypes to become more robust.
The approach to "fsck" the incoming objects in "index-pack" is attractive for performance reasons (we have them already in core, inflated and ready to be inspected), but fundamentally cannot be applied fully when we receive more than one pack stream, as a tree
object in one pack may refer to a blob object in another pack as ".gitmodules", when we want to inspect blobs that are used as ".gitmodules" file, for example. Teach "index-pack" to emit objects that must be inspected later and check them in the calling "fetch-pack" process.
The logic to handle "trailer" related placeholders in the "--format=" mechanisms in the "log" family and "for-each-ref" family is getting unified.
Raise the buffer size used when writing the index file out from (obviously too small) 8kB to (clearly sufficiently large) 128kB.
It is reported that open() on some platforms (e.g. macOS Big Sur) can return EINTR even though our timers are set up with SA_RESTART. A workaround has been implemented and enabled for macOS to rerun open() transparently from the caller when this happens.
Fixes since v2.30:
Diagnose command line error of "git rebase" early.
Clean up option descriptions in "git cmd --help".
"git stash" did not work well in a sparsely checked out working tree.
Some tests expect that "ls -l" output has either '-' or 'x' for group executable bit, but setgid bit can be inherited from parent directory and make these fields 'S' or 's' instead, causing test failures.
"git for-each-repo --config= " should not run for any repository when the configuration variable is not defined even once.
Fix 2.29 regression where "git mergetool --tool-help" fails to list all the available tools.
Fix for procedure to building CI test environment for mac.
The implementation of "git branch --sort" wrt the detached HEAD display has always been hacky, which has been cleaned up.
Newline characters in the host and path part of git:// URL are now forbidden.
"git diff" showed a submodule working tree with untracked cruft as "Submodule commit -dirty", but a natural expectation is that the "-dirty" indicator would align with "git describe --dirty", which does not consider having untracked files in the working tree as source of dirtiness. The inconsistency has been fixed.
When more than one commit with the same patch ID appears on one side, "git log --cherry-pick A...B" did not exclude them all when a commit with the same patch ID appears on the other side. Now it does.
Documentation for "git fsck" lost stale bits that has become incorrect.
Doc fix for packfile URI feature.
When "git rebase -i" processes "fixup" insn, there is no reason to clean up the commit log message, but we did the usual stripspace processing. This has been corrected. (merge f7d42ceec5 js/rebase-i-commit-cleanup-fix later to maint).
Fix in passing custom args from "git clone" to "upload-pack" on the other side. (merge ad6b5fefbd jv/upload-pack-filter-spec-quotefix later to maint).
The command line completion (in contrib/) completed "git branch -d" with branch names, but "git branch -D" offered tagnames in addition, which has been corrected. "git branch -M" had the same problem. (merge 27dc071b9a jk/complete-branch-force-delete later to maint).
When commands are started from a subdirectory, they may have to compare the path to the subdirectory (called prefix and found out from $(pwd)) with the tracked paths. On macOS, $(pwd) and readdir() yield decomposed path, while the tracked paths are usually normalized to the precomposed form, causing mismatch. This has been fixed by taking the same approach used to normalize the command line arguments. (merge 5c327502db tb/precompose-prefix-too later to maint).
Even though invocations of "die()" were logged to the trace2 system, "BUG()"s were not, which has been corrected. (merge 0a9dde4a04 jt/trace2-BUG later to maint).
"git grep --untracked" is meant to be "let's ALSO find in these files on the filesystem" when looking for matches in the working tree files, and does not make any sense if the primary search is done against the index, or the tree objects. The "--cached" and "--untracked" options have been marked as mutually incompatible. (merge 0c5d83b248 mt/grep-cached-untracked later to maint).
Fix "git fsck --name-objects" which apparently has not been used by anybody who is motivated enough to report breakage. (merge e89f89361c js/fsck-name-objects-fix later to maint).
Avoid individual tests in t5411 from getting affected by each other by forcing them to use separate output files during the test. (merge 822ee894f6 jx/t5411-unique-filenames later to maint).
Test to make sure "git rev-parse one-thing one-thing" gives the same thing twice (when one-thing is --since=X). (merge a5cdca4520 ew/rev-parse-since-test later to maint).
When certain features (e.g. grafts) used in the repository are incompatible with the use of the commit-graph, we used to silently turned commit-graph off; we now tell the user what we are doing. (merge c85eec7fc3 js/commit-graph-warning later to maint).
Objects that lost references can be pruned away, even when they have notes attached to it (and these notes will become dangling,
which in turn can be pruned with "git notes prune"). This has been clarified in the documentation. (merge fa9ab027ba mz/doc-notes-are-not-anchors later to maint).
The error codepath around the "--temp/--prefix" feature of "git checkout-index" has been improved. (merge 3f7ba60350 mt/checkout-index-corner-cases later to maint).
The "git maintenance register" command had trouble registering bare repositories, which had been corrected.
A handful of multi-word configuration variable names in documentation that are spelled in all lowercase have been corrected to use the more canonical camelCase. (merge 7dd0eaa39c dl/doc-config-camelcase later to maint).
"git push $there --delete ''" should have been diagnosed as an error, but instead turned into a matching push, which has been corrected. (merge 20e416409f jc/push-delete-nothing later to maint).
Test script modernization. (merge 488acf15df sv/t7001-modernize later to maint).
An under-allocation for the untracked cache data has been corrected. (merge 6347d649bc jh/untracked-cache-fix later to maint).
Other code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc.:
(merge e3f5da7e60 sg/t7800-difftool-robustify later to maint).
(merge 9d336655ba js/doc-proto-v2-response-end later to maint).
(merge 1b5b8cf072 jc/maint-column-doc-typofix later to maint).
(merge 3a837b58e3 cw/pack-config-doc later to maint).
(merge 01168a9d89 ug/doc-commit-approxidate later to maint).
(merge b865734760 js/params-vs-args later to maint).

New in Git 2.27.0 (Jul 23, 2020)

Backward compatibility notes:
When "git describe C" finds that commit C is pointed by a signed or annotated tag, which records T as its tagname in the object, the command gives T as its answer. Even if the user renames or moves such a tag from its natural location in the "refs/tags/" hierarchy, "git describe C" would still give T as the answer, but in such a case "git show T^0" would no longer work as expected. There may be nothing at "refs/tags/T" or even worse there may be a different tag instead.
Starting from this version, "git describe" will always use the "long" version, as if the "--long" option were given, when giving its output based on such a misplaced tag to work around the problem.
"git pull" issues a warning message until the pull.rebase configuration variable is explicitly given, which some existing users may find annoying---those who prefer not to rebase need to set the variable to false to squelch the warning.
The transport protocol version 2, which was promoted to the default in Git 2.26 release, turned out to have some remaining rough edges, so it has been demoted from the default.
UI, Workflows & Features:
A handful of options to configure SSL when talking to proxies have been added.
Smudge/clean conversion filters are now given more information (e.g. the object of the tree-ish in which the blob being converted appears, in addition to its path, which has already been given).
When "git describe C" finds an annotated tag with tagname A to be the best name to explain commit C, and the tag is stored in a "wrong" place in the refs/tags hierarchy, e.g. refs/tags/B, the command gave a warning message but used A (not B) to describe C. If C is exactly at the tag, the describe output would be "A", but "git rev-parse A^0" would not be equal as "git rev-parse C^0". The behavior of the command has been changed to use the "long" form i.e. A-0-gOBJECTNAME, which is correctly interpreted by rev-parse.
"git pull" learned to warn when no pull.rebase configuration exists, and neither --[no-]rebase nor --ff-only is given (which would result a merge).
"git p4" learned four new hooks and also "--no-verify" option to bypass them (and the existing "p4-pre-submit" hook).
"git pull" shares many options with underlying "git fetch", but some of them were not documented and some of those that would make sense to pass down were not passed down.
"git rebase" learned the "--no-gpg-sign" option to countermand commit.gpgSign the user may have.
The output from "git format-patch" uses RFC 2047 encoding for non-ASCII letters on From: and Subject: headers, so that it can directly be fed to e-mail programs. A new option has been added to produce these headers in raw.
"git log" learned "--show-pulls" that helps pathspec limited history views; a merge commit that takes the whole change from a side branch, which is normally omitted from the output, is shown in addition to the commits that introduce real changes.
The interactive input from various codepaths are consolidated and any prompt possibly issued earlier are fflush()ed before we read.
Allow "git rebase" to reapply all local commits, even if the may be already in the upstream, without checking first.
The 'pack.useSparse' configuration variable now defaults to 'true', enabling an optimization that has been experimental since Git 2.21.
"git rebase" happens to call some hooks meant for "checkout" and "commit" by this was not a designed behaviour than historical accident. This has been documented.
"git merge" learns the "--autostash" option.
"sparse-checkout" UI improvements.
"git update-ref --stdin" learned a handful of new verbs to let the user control ref update transactions more explicitly, which helps as an ingredient to implement two-phase commit-style atomic ref-updates across multiple repositories.
"git commit-graph write" learned different ways to write out split files.
Introduce an extension to the commit-graph to make it efficient to check for the paths that were modified at each commit using Bloom filters.
The approxidate parser learns to parse seconds with fraction and ignore fractional part.
The userdiff patterns for Markdown documents have been added.
The sparse-checkout patterns have been forbidden from excluding all paths, leaving an empty working tree, for a long time. This limitation has been lifted.
"git restore --staged --worktree" now defaults to take the contents out of "HEAD", instead of erring out.
"git p4" learned to recover from a (broken) state where a directory and a file are recorded at the same path in the Perforce repository the same way as their clients do.
"git multi-pack-index repack" has been taught to honor some repack.* configuration variables.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
The advise API has been revamped to allow more systematic enumeration of advice knobs in the future.
SHA-256 transition continues.
The code to interface with GnuPG has been refactored.
"git stash" has kept an escape hatch to use the scripted version for a few releases, which got stale. It has been removed.
Enable tests that require GnuPG on Windows.
Minor test usability improvement.
Trace2 enhancement to allow logging of the environment variables.
Test clean-up continues.
Perf-test update.
A Windows-specific test element has been made more robust against misuse from both user's environment and programmer's errors.
Various tests have been updated to work around issues found with shell utilities that come with busybox etc.
The config API made mixed uses of int and size_t types to represent length of various pieces of text it parsed, which has been updated to use the correct type (i.e. size_t) throughout.
The "--decorate-refs" and "--decorate-refs-exclude" options "git log" takes have learned a companion configuration variable log.excludeDecoration that sits at the lowest priority in the family.
A new CI job to build and run test suite on linux with musl libc has been added.
Update the CI configuration to use GitHub Actions, retiring the one based on Azure Pipelines.
The directory traversal code had redundant recursive calls which made its performance characteristics exponential with respect to the depth of the tree, which was corrected.
"git blame" learns to take advantage of the "changed-paths" Bloom filter stored in the commit-graph file.
The "bugreport" tool has been added.
The object walk with object filter "--filter=tree:0" can now take advantage of the pack bitmap when available.
Instead of always building all branches at GitHub via Actions, users can specify which branches to build.
Codepaths that show progress meter have been taught to also use the start_progress() and the stop_progress() calls as a "region" to be traced.
Instead of downloading Windows SDK for CI jobs for windows builds from an external site (wingit.blob.core.windows.net), use the one created in the windows-build job, to work around quota issues at the external site.
Fixes:
The real_path() convenience function can easily be misused; with a bit of code refactoring in the callers' side, its use has been eliminated. (merge 49d3c4b481 am/real-path-fix later to maint).
Update "git p4" to work with Python 3. (merge 6bb40ed20a yz/p4-py3 later to maint).
The mechanism to prevent "git commit" from making an empty commit or amending during an interrupted cherry-pick was broken during the rewrite of "git rebase" in C, which has been corrected. (merge 430b75f720 pw/advise-rebase-skip later to maint).
Fix "git checkout --recurse-submodules" of a nested submodule hierarchy. (merge 846f34d351 pb/recurse-submodules-fix later to maint).
The "--fork-point" mode of "git rebase" regressed when the command was rewritten in C back in 2.20 era, which has been corrected. (merge f08132f889 at/rebase-fork-point-regression-fix later to maint).
The import-tars importer (in contrib/fast-import/) used to create phony files at the top-level of the repository when the archive contains global PAX headers, which made its own logic to detect and omit the common leading directory ineffective, which has been corrected. (merge c839fcff65 js/import-tars-do-not-make-phony-files-from-pax-headers later to maint).
Simplify the commit ancestry connectedness check in a partial clone repository in which "promised" objects are assumed to be obtainable lazily on-demand from promisor remote repositories. (merge 2b98478c6f jt/connectivity-check-optim-in-partial-clone later to maint).
The server-end of the v2 protocol to serve "git clone" and "git fetch" was not prepared to see a delim packets at unexpected places, which led to a crash. (merge cacae4329f jk/harden-protocol-v2-delim-handling later to maint).
When fed a midx that records no objects, some codepaths tried to loop from 0 through (num_objects-1), which, due to integer arithmetic wrapping around, made it nonsense operation with out of bounds array accesses. The code has been corrected to reject such an midx file. (merge 796d61cdc0 dr/midx-avoid-int-underflow later to maint).
Utitiles run via the run_command() API were not spawned correctly on Cygwin, when the paths to them are given as a full path with backslashes. (merge 05ac8582bc ak/run-command-on-cygwin-fix later to maint).
"git pull --rebase" tried to run a rebase even after noticing that the pull results in a fast-forward and no rebase is needed nor sensible, for the past few years due to a mistake nobody noticed. (merge fbae70ddc6 en/pull-do-not-rebase-after-fast-forwarding later to maint).
"git rebase" with the merge backend did not work well when the rebase.abbreviateCommands configuration was set. (merge de9f1d3ef4 ag/rebase-merge-allow-ff-under-abbrev-command later to maint).
The logic to auto-follow tags by "git clone --single-branch" was not careful to avoid lazy-fetching unnecessary tags, which has been corrected. (merge 167a575e2d jk/use-quick-lookup-in-clone-for-tag-following later to maint).
"git rebase -i" did not leave the reflog entries correctly. (merge 1f6965f994 en/sequencer-reflog-action later to maint).
The more aggressive updates to remote-tracking branches we had for the past 7 years or so were not reflected in the documentation, which has been corrected. (merge a44088435c pb/pull-fetch-doc later to maint).
We've left the command line parsing of "git log :/a/b/" broken for about a full year without anybody noticing, which has been corrected. (merge 0220461071 jc/missing-ref-store-fix later to maint).
Misc fixes for Windows. (merge 3efc128cd5 js/mingw-fixes later to maint).
"git rebase" (again) learns to honor "--no-keep-empty", which lets the user to discard commits that are empty from the beginning (as opposed to the ones that become empty because of rebasing). The interactive rebase also marks commits that are empty in the todo. (merge 50ed76148a en/rebase-no-keep-empty later to maint).
Parsing the host part out of URL for the credential helper has been corrected. (merge 4c5971e18a jk/credential-parsing-end-of-host-in-URL later to maint).
Document the recommended way to abort a failing test early (e.g. by exiting a loop), which is to say "return 1". (merge 7cc112dc95 jc/doc-test-leaving-early later to maint).
The code that refreshes the last access and modified time of on-disk packfiles and loose object files have been updated. (merge 312cd76130 lr/freshen-file-fix later to maint).
Validation of push certificate has been made more robust against timing attacks. (merge 719483e547 bc/constant-memequal later to maint).
The custom hash function used by "git fast-import" has been replaced with the one from hashmap.c, which gave us a nice performance boost. (merge d8410a816b jk/fast-import-use-hashmap later to maint).
The "git submodule" command did not initialize a few variables it internally uses and was affected by variable settings leaked from the environment. (merge 65d100c4dd lx/submodule-clear-variables later to maint).
Raise the minimum required version of docbook-xsl package to 1.74, as 1.74.0 was from late 2008, which is more than 10 years old, and drop compatibility cruft from our documentation suite. (merge 3c255ad660 ma/doc-discard-docbook-xsl-1.73 later to maint).
"git log" learns "--[no-]mailmap" as a synonym to "--[no-]use-mailmap" (merge 88acccda38 jc/log-no-mailmap later to maint).
"git commit-graph write --expire-time=" did not use the given timestamp correctly, which has been corrected. (merge b09b785c78 ds/commit-graph-expiry-fix later to maint).
Tests update to use "test-chmtime" instead of "touch -t". (merge e892a56845 ds/t5319-touch-fix later to maint).
"git diff" in a partial clone learned to avoid lazy loading blob objects in more casese when they are not needed. (merge 95acf11a3d jt/avoid-prefetch-when-able-in-diff later to maint).
"git push --atomic" used to show failures for refs that weren't even pushed, which has been corrected. (merge dfe1b7f19c jx/atomic-push later to maint).
Code in builtin/*, i.e. those can only be called from within built-in subcommands, that implements bulk of a couple of subcommands have been moved to libgit.a so that they could be used by others. (merge 9460fd48b5 dl/libify-a-few later to maint).
Allowing the user to split a patch hunk while "git stash -p" does not work well; a band-aid has been added to make this (partially) work better.
"git diff-tree --pretty --notes" used to hit an assertion failure, as it forgot to initialize the notes subsystem. (merge 5778b22b3d tb/diff-tree-with-notes later to maint).
"git range-diff" fixes. (merge 8d1675eb7f vd/range-diff-with-custom-pretty-format-fix later to maint).
"git grep" did not quote a path with unusual character like other commands (like "git diff", "git status") do, but did quote when run from a subdirectory, both of which has been corrected. (merge 45115d8490 mt/grep-cquote-path later to maint).
GNU/Hurd is also among the ones that need the fopen() wrapper. (merge 274a1328fb jc/gnu-hurd-lets-fread-read-dirs later to maint).
Those fetching over protocol v2 from linux-next and other kernel repositories are reporting that v2 often fetches way too much than needed. (merge 11c7f2a30b jn/demote-proto2-from-default later to maint).
The upload-pack protocol v2 gave up too early before finding a common ancestor, resulting in a wasteful fetch from a fork of a project. This has been corrected to match the behaviour of v0 protocol. (merge 2f0a093dd6 jt/v2-fetch-nego-fix later to maint).
The build procedure did not use the libcurl library and its include files correctly for a custom-built installation. (merge 0573831950 jk/build-with-right-curl later to maint).
Tighten "git mailinfo" to notice and error out when decoded result contains NUL in it. (merge 3919997447 dd/mailinfo-with-nul later to maint).
Fix in-core inconsistency after fetching into a shallow repository that broke the code to write out commit-graph. (merge 37b9dcabfc tb/reset-shallow later to maint).
The commit-graph code exhausted file descriptors easily when it does not have to. (merge c8828530b7 tb/commit-graph-fd-exhaustion-fix later to maint).
The multi-pack-index left mmapped file descriptors open when it does not have to. (merge 6c7ff7cf7f ds/multi-pack-index later to maint).
Recent update to Homebrew used by macOS folks breaks build by moving gettext library and necessary headers. (merge a0b3108618 ds/build-homebrew-gettext-fix later to maint).
Incompatible options "--root" and "--fork-point" of "git rebase" have been marked and documented as being incompatible. (merge a35413c378 en/rebase-root-and-fork-point-are-incompatible later to maint).
Error and verbose trace messages from "git push" did not redact credential material embedded in URLs. (merge d192fa5006 js/anonymise-push-url-in-errors later to maint).
Update the parser used for credential.. configuration, to handle s with '/' in them correctly. (merge b44d0118ac bc/wildcard-credential later to maint).
Recent updates broke parsing of "credential.." where is not a full URL (e.g. [credential "https://"] helper = ...) stopped working, which has been corrected. (merge 9a121b0d22 js/partial-urlmatch-2.17 later to maint). (merge cd93e6c029 js/partial-urlmatch later to maint).
Some of the files commit-graph subsystem keeps on disk did not correctly honor the core.sharedRepository settings and some were left read-write.
In error messages that "git switch" mentions its option to create a new branch, "-b/-B" options were shown, where "-c/-C" options should be, which has been corrected. (merge 7c16ef7577 dl/switch-c-option-in-error-message later to maint).
With the recent tightening of the code that is used to parse various parts of a URL for use in the credential subsystem, a hand-edited credential-store file causes the credential helper to die, which is a bit too harsh to the users. Demote the error behaviour to just ignore and keep using well-formed lines instead. (merge c03859a665 cb/credential-store-ignore-bogus-lines later to maint).
The samples in the credential documentation has been updated to make it clear that we depict what would appear in the .git/config file, by adding appropriate quotes as needed.. (merge 177681a07e jk/credential-sample-update later to maint).
"git branch" and other "for-each-ref" variants accepted multiple --sort= options in the increasing order of precedence, but it had a few breakages around "--ignore-case" handling, and tie-breaking with the refname, which have been fixed. (merge 7c5045fc18 jk/for-each-ref-multi-key-sort-fix later to maint).
The coding guideline for shell scripts instructed to refer to a variable with dollar-sign inside arithmetic expansion to work around a bug in old versions of dash, which is a thing of the past. Now we are not forbidden from writing $((var+1)). (merge 32b5fe7f0e jk/arith-expansion-coding-guidelines later to maint).
The header on NetBSD brings in its own definition of hmac() function (eek), which conflicts with our own and unrelated function with the same name. Our function has been renamed to work around the issue. (merge 3013118eb8 cb/avoid-colliding-with-netbsd-hmac later to maint).
The basic test did not honor $TEST_SHELL_PATH setting, which has been corrected. (merge 0555e4af58 cb/t0000-use-the-configured-shell later to maint).
Minor in-code comments and documentation updates around credential API. (merge 1aed817f99 cb/credential-doc-fixes later to maint).
Teach "am", "commit", "merge" and "rebase", when they are run with the "--quiet" option, to pass "--quiet" down to "gc --auto". (merge 7c3e9e8cfb jc/auto-gc-quiet later to maint).
The code to skip unmerged paths in the index when sparse checkout is in use would have made out-of-bound access of the in-core index when the last path was unmerged, which has been corrected.
Serving a "git fetch" client over "git://" and "ssh://" protocols using the on-wire protocol version 2 was buggy on the server end when the client needs to make a follow-up request to e.g. auto-follow tags. (merge 08450ef791 cc/upload-pack-v2-fetch-fix later to maint).
"git bisect replay" had trouble with input files when they used CRLF line ending, which has been corrected. (merge 6c722cbe5a cw/bisect-replay-with-dos later to maint).
"rebase -i" segfaulted when rearranging a sequence that has a fix-up that applies another fix-up (which may or may not be a fix-up of yet another step). (merge 02471e7e20 js/rebase-autosquash-double-fixup-fix later to maint).
"git fsck" ensures that the paths recorded in tree objects are sorted and without duplicates, but it failed to notice a case where a blob is followed by entries that sort before a tree with the same name. This has been corrected. (merge 9068cfb20f rs/fsck-duplicate-names-in-trees later to maint).
Code clean-up by removing a compatibility implementation of a function we no longer use. (merge 84b0115f0d cb/no-more-gmtime later to maint).
When a binary file gets modified and renamed on both sides of history to different locations, both files would be written to the working tree but both would have the contents from "ours". This has been corrected so that the path from each side gets their original content.
Fix for a copy-and-paste error introduced during 2.20 era. (merge e68a5272b1 ds/multi-pack-verify later to maint).
Update an unconditional use of "grep -a" with a perl script in a test. (merge 1eb7371236 dd/t5703-grep-a-fix later to maint).
Other code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc:
(merge 564956f358 jc/maintain-doc later to maint).
(merge 7422b2a0a1 sg/commit-slab-clarify-peek later to maint).
(merge 9c688735f6 rs/doc-passthru-fetch-options later to maint).
(merge 757c2ba3e2 en/oidset-uninclude-hashmap later to maint).
(merge 8312aa7d74 jc/config-tar later to maint).
(merge d00a5bdd50 ss/submodule-foreach-cb later to maint).
(merge 64d1022e14 ar/test-style-fixes later to maint).
(merge 4a465443a6 ds/doc-clone-filter later to maint).
(merge bb2dbe301b jk/t3419-drop-expensive-tests later to maint).
(merge d3507cc712 js/test-junit-finalization-fix later to maint).
(merge 2149b6748f bc/faq later to maint).
(merge 12dc0879f1 jk/test-cleanup later to maint).
(merge 344420bf0f pb/rebase-doc-typofix later to maint).
(merge 7cd54d37dc dl/wrapper-fix-indentation later to maint).
(merge 78725ebda9 jc/allow-strlen-substitution-in-shell-scripts later to maint).
(merge 2ecfcdecc6 jm/gitweb-fastcgi-utf8 later to maint).
(merge 0740d0a5d3 jk/oid-array-cleanups later to maint).
(merge a1aba0c95c js/t0007-typofix later to maint).
(merge 76ba7fa225 ma/config-doc-fix later to maint).
(merge 826f0c0df2 js/subtree-doc-update-to-asciidoctor-2 later to maint).
(merge 88eaf361e0 eb/mboxrd-doc later to maint).
(merge 051cc54941 tm/zsh-complete-switch-restore later to maint).
(merge 39102cf4fe ms/doc-revision-illustration-fix later to maint).
(merge 4d9378bfad eb/gitweb-more-trailers later to maint).
(merge bdccbf7047 mt/doc-worktree-ref later to maint).
(merge ce9baf234f dl/push-recurse-submodules-fix later to maint).
(merge 4153274052 bc/doc-credential-helper-value later to maint).
(merge 5c7bb0146e jc/codingstyle-compare-with-null later to maint).

New in Git 2.26.0 (Jul 23, 2020)

Backward compatibility notes:
"git rebase" uses a different backend that is based on the 'merge' machinery by default. There are a few known differences in the behaviour from the traditional machinery based on patch+apply.
If your workflow is negatively affected by this change, please report it to [email protected] so that we can take a look into it. After doing so, you can set the 'rebase.backend' configuration variable to 'apply', in order to use the old default behaviour in the meantime.
UI, Workflows & Features:
Sample credential helper for using .netrc has been updated to work out of the box.
gpg.minTrustLevel configuration variable has been introduced to tell various signature verification codepaths the required minimum trust level.
The command line completion (in contrib/) learned to complete subcommands and arguments to "git worktree".
Disambiguation logic to tell revisions and pathspec apart has been tweaked so that backslash-escaped glob special characters do not count in the "wildcards are pathspec" rule.
One effect of specifying where the GIT_DIR is (either with the environment variable, or with the "git --git-dir= cmd" option) is to disable the repository discovery. This has been placed a bit more stress in the documentation, as new users often get confused.
Two help messages given when "git add" notices the user gave it nothing to add have been updated to use advise() API.
A new version of fsmonitor-watchman hook has been introduced, to avoid races.
"git config" learned to show in which "scope", in addition to in which file, each config setting comes from.
The basic 7 colors learned the brighter counterparts (e.g. "brightred").
"git sparse-checkout" learned a new "add" subcommand.
A configuration element used for credential subsystem can now use wildcard pattern to specify for which set of URLs the entry applies.
"git clone --recurse-submodules --single-branch" now uses the same single-branch option when cloning the submodules.
"git rm" and "git stash" learns the new "--pathspec-from-file" option.
"git am --show-current-patch" is a way to show the piece of e-mail for the stopped step, which is not suitable to directly feed "git apply" (it is designed to be a good "git am" input). It learned a new option to show only the patch part.
Handling of conflicting renames in merge-recursive have further been made consistent with how existing codepaths try to mimic what is done to add/add conflicts.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
Tell .editorconfig that in this project, *.txt files are indented with tabs.
The test-lint machinery knew to check "VAR=VAL shell_function" construct, but did not check "VAR= shell_function", which has been corrected.
Replace "git config --bool" calls with "git config --type=bool" in sample templates.
The effort to move "git-add--interactive" to C continues.
Improve error message generation for "git submodule add".
Preparation of test scripts for the day when the object names will use SHA-256 continues.
Warn programmers about pretend_object_file() that allows the code to tentatively use in-core objects.
The way "git pack-objects" reuses objects stored in existing pack to generate its result has been improved.
The transport protocol version 2 becomes the default one.
Traditionally, we avoided threaded grep while searching in objects (as opposed to files in the working tree) as accesses to the object layer is not thread-safe. This limitation is getting lifted.
"git rebase -i" (and friends) used to unnecessarily check out the tip of the branch to be rebased, which has been corrected.
A low-level API function get_oid(), that accepts various ways to name an object, used to issue end-user facing error messages without l10n, which has been updated to be translatable.
Unneeded connectivity check is now disabled in a partial clone when fetching into it.
Some rough edges in the sparse-checkout feature, especially around the cone mode, have been cleaned up.
The diff-* plumbing family of subcommands now pay attention to the diff.wsErrorHighlight configuration, which has been ignored before; this allows "git add -p" to also show the whitespace problems to the end user.
Some codepaths were given a repository instance as a parameter to work in the repository, but passed the_repository instance to its callees, which has been cleaned up (somewhat).
Memory footprint and performance of "git name-rev" has been improved.
The object reachability bitmap machinery and the partial cloning machinery were not prepared to work well together, because some object-filtering criteria that partial clones use inherently rely on object traversal, but the bitmap machinery is an optimization to bypass that object traversal. There however are some cases where they can work together, and they were taught about them.
"git rebase" has learned to use the merge backend (i.e. the machinery that drives "rebase -i") by default, while allowing "--apply" option to use the "apply" backend (e.g. the moral equivalent of "format-patch piped to am"). The rebase.backend configuration variable can be set to customize.
Underlying machinery of "git bisect--helper" is being refactored into pieces that are more easily reused.
Fixes:
"git commit" gives output similar to "git status" when there is nothing to commit, but without honoring the advise.statusHints configuration variable, which has been corrected.
has_object_file() said "no" given an object registered to the system via pretend_object_file(), making it inconsistent with read_object_file(), causing lazy fetch to attempt fetching an empty tree from promisor remotes.
Complete an update to tutorial that encourages "git switch" over "git checkout" that was done only half-way.
C pedantry ;-) fix.
The code that tries to skip over the entries for the paths in a single directory using the cache-tree was not careful enough against corrupt index file.
Reduce unnecessary round-trip when running "ls-remote" over the stateless RPC mechanism.
"git restore --staged" did not correctly update the cache-tree structure, resulting in bogus trees to be written afterwards, which has been corrected.
The code recently added to move to the entry beyond the ones in the same directory in the index in the sparse-cone mode did not count the number of entries to skip over incorrectly, which has been corrected.
Rendering by "git log --graph" of ancestry lines leading to a merge commit were made suboptimal to waste vertical space a bit with a recent update, which has been corrected.
Work around test breakages caused by custom regex engine used in libasan, when address sanitizer is used with more recent versions of gcc and clang.
Minor bugfixes to "git add -i" that has recently been rewritten in C.
"git fetch --refmap=" option has got a better documentation.
"git checkout X" did not correctly fail when X is not a local branch but could name more than one remote-tracking branches (i.e. to be dwimmed as the starting point to create a corresponding local branch), which has been corrected. (merge fa74180d08 am/checkout-file-and-ref-ref-ambiguity later to maint).
Corner case bugs in "git clean" that stems from a (necessarily for performance reasons) awkward calling convention in the directory enumeration API has been corrected.
A fetch that is told to recursively fetch updates in submodules inevitably produces reams of output, and it becomes hard to spot error messages. The command has been taught to enumerate submodules that had errors at the end of the operation. (merge 0222540827 es/fetch-show-failed-submodules-atend later to maint).
The "--recurse-submodules" option of various subcommands did not work well when run in an alternate worktree, which has been corrected.
Futureproofing a test not to depend on the current implementation detail.
Running "git rm" on a submodule failed unnecessarily when .gitmodules is only cache-dirty, which has been corrected.
C pedantry ;-) fix.
"git grep --no-index" should not get affected by the contents of the .gitmodules file but when "--recurse-submodules" is given or the "submodule.recurse" variable is set, it did. Now these settings are ignored in the "--no-index" mode.
Technical details of the bundle format has been documented.
Unhelpful warning messages during documentation build have been squelched.
"git rebase -i" identifies existing commits in its todo file with their abbreviated object name, which could become ambiguous as it goes to create new commits, and has a mechanism to avoid ambiguity in the main part of its execution. A few other cases however were not covered by the protection against ambiguity, which has been corrected.
Allow the rebase.missingCommitsCheck configuration to kick in when "rebase --edit-todo" and "rebase --continue" restarts the procedure. (merge 5a5445d878 ag/edit-todo-drop-check later to maint).
The way "git submodule status" reports an initialized but not yet populated submodule has not been reimplemented correctly when a part of the "git submodule" command was rewritten in C, which has been corrected. (merge f38c92452d pk/status-of-uncloned-submodule later to maint).
The code to automatically shrink the fan-out in the notes tree had an off-by-one bug, which has been killed.
The index-pack code now diagnoses a bad input packstream that records the same object twice when it is used as delta base; the code used to declare a software bug when encountering such an input, but it is an input error.
The code to compute the commit-graph has been taught to use a more robust way to tell if two object directories refer to the same thing. (merge a7df60cac8 tb/commit-graph-object-dir later to maint).
"git remote rename X Y" needs to adjust configuration variables (e.g. branch..remote) whose value used to be X to Y. branch..pushRemote is now also updated.
Update to doc-diff.
Doc markup fix.
"git check-ignore" did not work when the given path is explicitly marked as not ignored with a negative entry in the .gitignore file.
The merge-recursive machinery failed to refresh the cache entry for a merge result in a couple of places, resulting in an unnecessary merge failure, which has been fixed.
Fix for a bug revealed by a recent change to make the protocol v2 the default.
In rare cases "git worktree add " could think that was already a registered worktree even when it wasn't and refuse to add the new worktree. This has been corrected. (merge bb69b3b009 es/worktree-avoid-duplication-fix later to maint).
"git push" should stop from updating a branch that is checked out when receive.denyCurrentBranch configuration is set, but it failed to pay attention to checkouts in secondary worktrees. This has been corrected. (merge 4d864895a2 hv/receive-denycurrent-everywhere later to maint).
"git rebase BASE BRANCH" rebased/updated the tip of BRANCH and checked it out, even when the BRANCH is checked out in a different worktree. This has been corrected. (merge b5cabb4a96 es/do-not-let-rebase-switch-to-protected-branch later to maint).
"git describe" in a repository with multiple root commits sometimes gave up looking for the best tag to describe a given commit with too early, which has been adjusted.
"git merge signed-tag" while lacking the public key started to say "No signature", which was utterly wrong. This regression has been reverted.
MinGW's poll() emulation has been improved.
"git show" and others gave an object name in raw format in its error output, which has been corrected to give it in hex.
"git fetch" over HTTP walker protocol did not show any progress output. We inherently do not know how much work remains, but still we can show something not to bore users. (merge 7655b4119d rs/show-progress-in-dumb-http-fetch later to maint).
Both "git ls-remote -h" and "git grep -h" give short usage help, like any other Git subcommand, but it is not unreasonable to expect that the former would behave the same as "git ls-remote --head" (there is no other sensible behaviour for the latter). The documentation has been updated in an attempt to clarify this.
Other code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc:
(merge d0d0a357a1 am/update-pathspec-f-f-tests later to maint).
(merge f94f7bd00d am/test-pathspec-f-f-error-cases later to maint).
(merge c513a958b6 ss/t6025-modernize later to maint).
(merge b441717256 dl/test-must-fail-fixes later to maint).
(merge d031049da3 mt/sparse-checkout-doc-update later to maint).
(merge 145136a95a jc/skip-prefix later to maint).
(merge 5290d45134 jk/alloc-cleanups later to maint).
(merge 7a9f8ca805 rs/parse-options-concat-dup later to maint).
(merge 517b60564e rs/strbuf-insertstr later to maint).
(merge f696a2b1c8 jk/mailinfo-cleanup later to maint).
(merge de26f02db1 js/test-avoid-pipe later to maint).
(merge a2dc43414c es/doc-mentoring later to maint).
(merge 02bbbe9df9 es/worktree-cleanup later to maint).
(merge 2ce6d075fa rs/micro-cleanups later to maint).
(merge 27f182b3fc rs/blame-typefix-for-fingerprint later to maint).
(merge 3c29e21eb0 ma/test-cleanup later to maint).
(merge 240fc04f81 ag/rebase-remove-redundant-code later to maint).
(merge d68ce906c7 rs/commit-graph-code-simplification later to maint).
(merge a51d9e8f07 rj/t1050-use-test-path-is-file later to maint).
(merge fd0bc17557 kk/complete-diff-color-moved later to maint).
(merge 65bf820d0e en/test-cleanup later to maint).

New in Git 2.25.0 (Jul 23, 2020)

Backward compatibility notes:
UI, Workflows & Features:
A tutorial on object enumeration has been added.
The branch description ("git branch --edit-description") has been used to fill the body of the cover letters by the format-patch command; this has been enhanced so that the subject can also be filled.
"git rebase --preserve-merges" has been marked as deprecated; this release stops advertising it in the "git rebase -h" output.
The code to generate multi-pack index learned to show (or not to show) progress indicators.
"git apply --3way" learned to honor merge.conflictStyle configuration variable, like merges would.
The custom format for "git log --format=" learned the l/L placeholder that is similar to e/E that fills in the e-mail address, but only the local part on the left side of '@'.
Documentation pages for "git shortlog" now list commit limiting options explicitly.
The patterns to detect function boundary for Elixir language has been added.
The completion script (in contrib/) learned that the "--onto" option of "git rebase" can take its argument as the value of the option.
The userdiff machinery has been taught that "async def" is another way to begin a "function" in Python.
"git range-diff" learned to take the "--notes=" and the "--no-notes" options to control the commit notes included in the log message that gets compared.
"git rev-parse --show-toplevel" run outside of any working tree did not error out, which has been corrected.
A few commands learned to take the pathspec from the standard input or a named file, instead of taking it as the command line arguments, with the "--pathspec-from-file" option.
"git submodule" learned a subcommand "set-url".
"git log" family learned "--pretty=reference" that gives the name of a commit in the format that is often used to refer to it in log messages.
The interaction between "git clone --recurse-submodules" and alternate object store was ill-designed. The documentation and code have been taught to make more clear recommendations when the users see failures.
Management of sparsely checked-out working tree has gained a dedicated "sparse-checkout" command.
Miscellaneous small UX improvements on "git-p4".
"git sparse-checkout list" subcommand learned to give its output in a more concise form when the "cone" mode is in effect.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
Debugging support for lazy cloning has been a bit improved.
Move the definition of a set of bitmask constants from 0ctal literal to (1U

New in Git 2.24.0 (Jul 23, 2020)

Backward compatibility note:
"filter-branch" is showing its age and alternatives are available. From this release, we started to discourage its use and hint people about filter-repo.
UI, Workflows & Features:
We now have an active interim maintainer for the Git-Gui part of the system. Praise and thank Pratyush Yadav for volunteering.
The command line parser learned "--end-of-options" notation; the standard convention for scripters to have hardcoded set of options first on the command line, and force the command to treat end-user input as non-options, has been to use "--" as the delimiter, but that would not work for commands that use "--" as a delimiter between revs and pathspec.
A mechanism to affect the default setting for a (related) group of configuration variables is introduced.
"git fetch" learned "--set-upstream" option to help those who first clone from their private fork they intend to push to, add the true upstream via "git remote add" and then "git fetch" from it.
Device-tree files learned their own userdiff patterns. (merge 3c81760bc6 sb/userdiff-dts later to maint).
"git rebase --rebase-merges" learned to drive different merge strategies and pass strategy specific options to them.
A new "pre-merge-commit" hook has been introduced.
Command line completion updates for "git -c var.name=val" have been added.
The lazy clone machinery has been taught that there can be more than one promisor remote and consult them in order when downloading missing objects on demand.
The list-objects-filter API (used to create a sparse/lazy clone) learned to take a combined filter specification.
The documentation and tests for "git format-patch" have been cleaned up.
On Windows, the root level of UNC share is now allowed to be used just like any other directory.
The command line completion support (in contrib/) learned about the "--skip" option of "git revert" and "git cherry-pick".
"git rebase --keep-base " tries to find the original base of the topic being rebased and rebase on top of that same base, which is useful when running the "git rebase -i" (and its limited variant "git rebase -x").
The command also has learned to fast-forward in more cases where it can instead of replaying to recreate identical commits.
A configuration variable tells "git fetch" to write the commit graph after finishing.
"git add -i" has been taught to show the total number of hunks and the hunks that has been processed so far when showing prompts.
"git fetch --jobs=" allowed parallel jobs when fetching submodules, but this did not apply to "git fetch --multiple" that fetches from multiple remote repositories. It now does.
The installation instruction for zsh completion script (in contrib/) has been a bit improved.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
The code to write commit-graph over given commit object names has been made a bit more robust.
The first line of verbose output from each test piece now carries the test name and number to help scanning with eyeballs.
Further clean-up of the initialization code.
xmalloc() used to have a mechanism to ditch memory and address space resources as the last resort upon seeing an allocation failure from the underlying malloc(), which made the code complex and thread-unsafe with dubious benefit, as major memory resource users already do limit their uses with various other mechanisms. It has been simplified away.
Unnecessary full-tree diff in "git log -L" machinery has been optimized away.
The http transport lacked some optimization the native transports learned to avoid unnecessary ref advertisement, which has been corrected.
Preparation for SHA-256 upgrade continues in the test department. (merge 0c37c41d13 bc/hash-independent-tests-part-5 later to maint).
The memory ownership model of the "git fast-import" got straightened out.
Output from trace2 subsystem is formatted more prettily now.
The internal code originally invented for ".gitignore" processing got reshuffled and renamed to make it less tied to "excluding" and stress more that it is about "matching", as it has been reused for things like sparse checkout specification that want to check if a path is "included".
"git stash" learned to write refreshed index back to disk.
Coccinelle checks are done on more source files than before now.
The cache-tree code has been taught to be less aggressive in attempting to see if a tree object it computed already exists in the repository.
The code to parse and use the commit-graph file has been made more robust against corrupted input.
The hg-to-git script (in contrib/) has been updated to work with Python 3.
Update the way build artifacts in t/helper/ directory are ignored.
Preparation for SHA-256 upgrade continues.
"git log --graph" for an octopus merge is sometimes colored incorrectly, which is demonstrated and documented but not yet fixed.
The trace2 output, when sending them to files in a designated directory, can populate the directory with too many files; a mechanism is introduced to set the maximum number of files and discard further logs when the maximum is reached.
We have adopted a Code-of-conduct document. (merge 3f9ef874a7 jk/coc later to maint).
Fixes:
"git grep --recurse-submodules" that looks at the working tree files looked at the contents in the index in submodules, instead of files in the working tree. (merge 6a289d45c0 mt/grep-submodules-working-tree later to maint).
Codepaths to walk tree objects have been audited for integer overflows and hardened. (merge 5aa02f9868 jk/tree-walk-overflow later to maint).
"git pack-refs" can lose refs that are created while running, which is getting corrected. (merge a613d4f817 sc/pack-refs-deletion-racefix later to maint).
"git checkout" and "git restore" to re-populate the index from a tree-ish (typically HEAD) did not work correctly for a path that was removed and then added again with the intent-to-add bit, when the corresponding working tree file was empty. This has been corrected.
Compilation fix. (merge 70597e8386 rs/nedalloc-fixlets later to maint).
"git gui" learned to call the clean-up procedure before exiting. (merge 0d88f3d2c5 py/git-gui-do-quit later to maint).
We promoted the "indent heuristics" that decides where to split diff hunks from experimental to the default a few years ago, but some stale documentation still marked it as experimental, which has been corrected. (merge 64e5e1fba1 sg/diff-indent-heuristic-non-experimental later to maint).
Fix a mismerge that happened in 2.22 timeframe. (merge acb7da05ac en/checkout-mismerge-fix later to maint).
"git archive" recorded incorrect length in extended pax header in some corner cases, which has been corrected. (merge 71d41ff651 rs/pax-extended-header-length-fix later to maint).
On-demand object fetching in lazy clone incorrectly tried to fetch commits from submodule projects, while still working in the superproject, which has been corrected. (merge a63694f523 jt/diff-lazy-fetch-submodule-fix later to maint).
Prepare get_short_oid() codepath to be thread-safe. (merge 7cfcb16b0e rs/sort-oid-array-thread-safe later to maint).
"for-each-ref" and friends that show refs did not protect themselves against ancient tags that did not record tagger names when asked to show "%(taggername)", which have been corrected. (merge 8b3f33ef11 mp/for-each-ref-missing-name-or-email later to maint).
The "git am" based backend of "git rebase" ignored the result of updating ".gitattributes" done in one step when replaying subsequent steps. (merge 2c65d90f75 bc/reread-attributes-during-rebase later to maint).
Tell cURL library to use the same malloc() implementation, with the xmalloc() wrapper, as the rest of the system, for consistency. (merge 93b980e58f cb/curl-use-xmalloc later to maint).
Build fix to adjust .gitignore to unignore a path that we started to track. (merge aac6ff7b5b js/visual-studio later to maint).
A few implementation fixes in the notes API. (merge 60fe477a0b mh/notes-duplicate-entries later to maint).
Fix an earlier regression to "git push --all" which should have been forbidden when the target remote repository is set to be a mirror. (merge 8e4c8af058 tg/push-all-in-mirror-forbidden later to maint).
Fix an earlier regression in the test suite, which mistakenly stopped running HTTPD tests. (merge 3960290675 sg/git-test-boolean later to maint).
"git rebase --autostash ", when is different from the current branch, incorrectly moved the tip of the current branch, which has been corrected. (merge bf1e28e0ad bw/rebase-autostash-keep-current-branch later to maint).
Update support for Asciidoctor documentation toolchain. (merge 83b0b8953e ma/asciidoctor-refmiscinfo later to maint).
Start using DocBook 5 (instead of DocBook 4.5) as Asciidoctor 2.0 no longer works with the older one. (merge f6461b82b9 bc/doc-use-docbook-5 later to maint).
The markup used in user-manual has been updated to work better with asciidoctor. (merge c4d2f6143a ma/user-manual-markup-update later to maint).
Make sure the grep machinery does not abort when seeing a payload that is not UTF-8 even when JIT is not in use with PCRE1. (merge ad7c543e3b cb/skip-utf8-check-with-pcre1 later to maint).
The name of the blob object that stores the filter specification for sparse cloning/fetching was interpreted in a wrong place in the code, causing Git to abort.
"git log --decorate-refs-exclude=" was incorrectly overruled when the "--simplify-by-decoration" option is used, which has been corrected. (merge 0cc7380d88 rs/simplify-by-deco-with-deco-refs-exclude later to maint).
The "upload-pack" (the counterpart of "git fetch") needs to disable commit-graph when responding to a shallow clone/fetch request, but the way this was done made Git panic, which has been corrected.
The object traversal machinery has been optimized not to load tree objects when we are only interested in commit history. (merge 72ed80c784 jk/list-objects-optim-wo-trees later to maint).
The object name parser for "Nth parent" syntax has been made more robust against integer overflows. (merge 59fa5f5a25 rs/nth-parent-parse later to maint).
The code used in following tags in "git fetch" has been optimized. (merge b7e2d8bca5 ms/fetch-follow-tag-optim later to maint).
Regression fix for progress output. (merge 2bb74b53a4 sg/progress-fix later to maint).
A bug in merge-recursive code that triggers when a branch with a symbolic link is merged with a branch that replaces it with a directory has been fixed. (merge 83e3ad3b12 jt/merge-recursive-symlink-is-not-a-dir-in-way later to maint).
The rename detection logic sorts a list of rename source candidates by similarity to pick the best candidate, which means that a tie between sources with the same similarity is broken by the original location in the original candidate list (which is sorted by path). Force the sorting by similarity done with a stable sort, which is not promised by system supplied qsort(3), to ensure consistent results across platforms. (merge 2049b8dc65 js/diff-rename-force-stable-sort later to maint).
The code to skip "UTF" and "UTF-" prefix, when computing an advice message, did not work correctly when the prefix was "UTF", which has been fixed. (merge b181676ce9 rs/convert-fix-utf-without-dash later to maint).
The author names taken from SVN repositories may have extra leading or trailing whitespaces, which are now munged away. (merge 4ddd4bddb1 tk/git-svn-trim-author-name later to maint).
"git rebase -i" showed a wrong HEAD while "reword" open the editor. (merge b0a3186140 pw/rebase-i-show-HEAD-to-reword later to maint).
A few simplification and bugfixes to PCRE interface. (merge c581e4a749 ab/pcre-jit-fixes later to maint).
PCRE fixes. (merge ff61681b46 cb/pcre1-cleanup later to maint).
"git range-diff" segfaulted when diff.noprefix configuration was used, as it blindly expected the patch it internally generates to have the standard a/ and b/ prefixes. The command now forces the internal patch to be built without any prefix, not to be affected by any end-user configuration. (merge 937b76ed49 js/range-diff-noprefix later to maint).
"git stash apply" in a subdirectory of a secondary worktree failed to access the worktree correctly, which has been corrected. (merge dfd557c978 js/stash-apply-in-secondary-worktree later to maint).
The merge-recursive machinery is one of the most complex parts of the system that accumulated cruft over time. This large series cleans up the implementation quite a bit. (merge b657047719 en/merge-recursive-cleanup later to maint).
Pretty-printed command line formatter (used in e.g. reporting the command being run by the tracing API) had a bug that lost an argument that is an empty string, which has been corrected. (merge ce2d7ed2fd gs/sq-quote-buf-pretty later to maint).
"git range-diff" failed to handle mode-only change, which has been corrected. (merge 2b6a9b13ca tg/range-diff-output-update later to maint).
Dev support update. (merge 4f3c1dc5d6 dl/allow-running-cocci-verbosely later to maint).
"git format-patch -o " did an equivalent of "mkdir " not "mkdir -p ", which was corrected.
"git stash save" lost local changes to submodules, which has been corrected. (merge 556895d0c8 jj/stash-reset-only-toplevel later to maint).
The atomic push over smart HTTP transport did not work, which has been corrected. (merge 6f1194246a bc/smart-http-atomic-push later to maint).
Other code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc:
(merge d1387d3895 en/fast-import-merge-doc later to maint).
(merge 1c24a54ea4 bm/repository-layout-typofix later to maint).
(merge 415b770b88 ds/midx-expire-repack later to maint).
(merge 19800bdc3f nd/diff-parseopt later to maint).
(merge 58166c2e9d tg/t0021-racefix later to maint).
(merge 7027f508c7 dl/compat-cleanup later to maint).
(merge e770fbfeff jc/test-cleanup later to maint).
(merge 1fd881d404 rs/trace2-dst-warning later to maint).
(merge 7e92756751 mh/http-urlmatch-cleanup later to maint).
(merge 9784f97321 mh/release-commit-memory-fix later to maint).
(merge 60d198d022 tb/banned-vsprintf-namefix later to maint).
(merge 80e3658647 rs/help-unknown-ref-does-not-return later to maint).
(merge 0a8bc7068f dt/remote-helper-doc-re-lock-option later to maint).
(merge 27fd1e4ea7 en/merge-options-ff-and-friends later to maint).
(merge 502c386ff9 sg/clean-nested-repo-with-ignored later to maint).
(merge 26e3d1cbea am/mailmap-andrey-mazo later to maint).
(merge 47b27c96fa ss/get-time-cleanup later to maint).
(merge dd2e50a84e jk/commit-graph-cleanup later to maint).
(merge 4fd39c76e6 cs/pretty-formats-doc-typofix later to maint).
(merge 40e747e89d dl/submodule-set-branch later to maint).
(merge 689a146c91 rs/commit-graph-use-list-count later to maint).
(merge 0eb7c37a8a js/doc-patch-text later to maint).
(merge 4b3aa170d1 rs/nth-switch-code-simplification later to maint).
(merge 0d4304c124 ah/doc-submodule-ignore-submodules later to maint).
(merge af78249463 cc/svn-fe-py-shebang later to maint).
(merge 7bd97d6dff rs/alias-use-copy-array later to maint).
(merge c46ebc2496 sg/travis-help-debug later to maint).
(merge 24c681794f ps/my-first-contribution-alphasort later to maint).
(merge 75b2c15435 cb/do-not-use-test-cmp-with-a later to maint).
(merge cda0d497e3 bw/submodule-helper-usage-fix later to maint).
(merge fe0ed5d5e9 am/visual-studio-config-fix later to maint).
(merge 2e09c01232 sg/name-rev-cutoff-underflow-fix later to maint).
(merge ddb3c856f3 as/shallow-slab-use-fix later to maint).
(merge 71f4960b91 js/mingw-spawn-with-spaces-in-path later to maint).
(merge 53d687bf5f ah/cleanups later to maint).
(merge f537485fa5 rs/test-remove-useless-debugging-cat later to maint).
(merge 11a3d3aadd dl/rev-list-doc-cleanup later to maint).
(merge d928a8388a am/t0028-utf16-tests later to maint).
(merge b05b40930e dl/t0000-skip-test-test later to maint).
(merge 03d3b1297c js/xdiffi-comment-updates later to maint).
(merge 57d8f4b4c7 js/doc-stash-save later to maint).
(merge 8c1cfd58e3 ta/t1308-typofix later to maint).
(merge fa364ad790 bb/utf8-wcwidth-cleanup later to maint).
(merge 68b69211b2 bb/compat-util-comment-fix later to maint).
(merge 5cc6a4be11 rs/http-push-simplify later to maint).
(merge a81e42d235 rs/column-use-utf8-strnwidth later to maint).
(merge 062a309d36 rs/remote-curl-use-argv-array later to maint).
(merge 3b3c79f6c9 nr/diff-highlight-indent-fix later to maint).
(merge 3444ec2eb2 wb/fsmonitor-bitmap-fix later to maint).
(merge 10da030ab7 cb/pcre2-chartables-leakfix later to maint).
(merge 60e6569a12 js/mingw-needs-hiding-fix later to maint).
(merge 52bd3e4657 rl/gitweb-blame-prev-fix later to maint).

New in Git 2.23.0 (Sep 4, 2019)

Backward compatibility note:
The "--base" option of "format-patch" computed the patch-ids for prerequisite patches in an unstable way, which has been updated to compute in a way that is compatible with "git patch-id --stable".
The "git log" command by default behaves as if the --mailmap option was given.
UI, Workflows & Features:
The "git fast-export/import" pair has been taught to handle commits with log messages in encoding other than UTF-8 better.
In recent versions of Git, per-worktree refs are exposed in refs/worktrees// hierarchy, which means that worktree names must be a valid refname component. The code now sanitizes the names given to worktrees, to make sure these refs are well-formed.
"git merge" learned "--quit" option that cleans up the in-progress merge while leaving the working tree and the index still in a mess.
"git format-patch" learns a configuration to set the default for its --notes= option.
The code to show args with potential typo that cannot be interpreted as a commit-ish has been improved.
"git clone --recurse-submodules" learned to set up the submodules to ignore commit object names recorded in the superproject gitlink and instead use the commits that happen to be at the tip of the remote-tracking branches from the get-go, by passing the new "--remote-submodules" option.
The pattern "git diff/grep" use to extract funcname and words boundary for Matlab has been extend to cover Octave, which is more or less equivalent.
"git help git" was hard to discover (well, at least for some people).
The pattern "git diff/grep" use to extract funcname and words boundary for Rust has been added.
"git status" can be told a non-standard default value for the "--[no-]ahead-behind" option with a new configuration variable status.aheadBehind.
"git fetch" and "git pull" reports when a fetch results in non-fast-forward updates to let the user notice unusual situation. The commands learned "--no-show-forced-updates" option to disable this safety feature.
Two new commands "git switch" and "git restore" are introduced to split "checking out a branch to work on advancing its history" and "checking out paths out of the index and/or a tree-ish to work on advancing the current history" out of the single "git checkout" command.
"git branch --list" learned to always output the detached HEAD as the first item (when the HEAD is detached, of course), regardless of the locale.
The conditional inclusion mechanism learned to base the choice on the branch the HEAD currently is on.
"git rev-list --objects" learned the "--no-object-names" option to squelch the path to the object that is used as a grouping hint for pack-objects.
A new tag.gpgSign configuration variable turns "git tag -a" into "git tag -s".
"git multi-pack-index" learned expire and repack subcommands.
"git blame" learned to "ignore" commits in the history, whose effects (as well as their presence) get ignored.
"git cherry-pick/revert" learned a new "--skip" action.
The tips of refs from the alternate object store can be used as starting point for reachability computation now.
Extra blank lines in "git status" output have been reduced.
The commits in a repository can be described by multiple commit-graph files now, which allows the commit-graph files to be updated incrementally.
"git range-diff" output has been tweaked for easier identification of which part of what file the patch shown is about.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.:
Update supporting parts of "git rebase" to remove code that should no longer be used.
Developer support to emulate unsatisfied prerequisites in tests to ensure that the remainder of the tests still succeeds when tests with prerequisites are skipped.
"git update-server-info" learned not to rewrite the file with the same contents.
The way of specifying the path to find dynamic libraries at runtime has been simplified. The old default to pass -R/path/to/dir has been replaced with the new default to pass -Wl,-rpath,/path/to/dir, which is the more recent GCC uses. Those who need to build with an old GCC can still use "CC_LD_DYNPATH=-R"
Prepare use of reachability index in topological walker that works on a range (A..B).
A new tutorial targeting specifically aspiring git-core developers has been added.
Auto-detect how to tell HP-UX aCC where to use dynamically linked libraries from at runtime.
"git mergetool" and its tests now spawn fewer subprocesses.
Dev support update to help tracing out tests.
Support to build with MSVC has been updated.
"git fetch" that grabs from a group of remotes learned to run the auto-gc only once at the very end.
A handful of Windows build patches have been upstreamed.
The code to read state files used by the sequencer machinery for "git status" has been made more robust against a corrupt or stale state files.
"git for-each-ref" with multiple patterns have been optimized.
The tree-walk API learned to pass an in-core repository instance throughout more codepaths.
When one step in multi step cherry-pick or revert is reset or committed, the command line prompt script failed to notice the current status, which has been improved.
Many GIT_TEST_* environment variables control various aspects of how our tests are run, but a few followed "non-empty is true, empty or unset is false" while others followed the usual "there are a few ways to spell true, like yes, on, etc., and also ways to spell false, like no, off, etc." convention.
Adjust the dir-iterator API and apply it to the local clone optimization codepath.
We have been trying out a few language features outside c89; the coding guidelines document did not talk about them and instead had a blanket ban against them.
A test helper has been introduced to optimize preparation of test repositories with many simple commits, and a handful of test scripts have been updated to use it.
Fixes since v2.22:
A relative pathname given to "git init --template= " ought to be relative to the directory "git init" gets invoked in, but it instead was made relative to the repository, which has been corrected.
"git worktree add" used to fail when another worktree connected to the same repository was corrupt, which has been corrected.
The ownership rule for the file descriptor to fast-import remote backend was mixed up, leading to an unrelated file descriptor getting closed, which has been fixed.
A "merge -c" instruction during "git rebase --rebase-merges" should give the user a chance to edit the log message, even when there is otherwise no need to create a new merge and replace the existing one (i.e. fast-forward instead), but did not. Which has been corrected.
Code cleanup and futureproof.
More parameter validation.
"git update-server-info" used to leave stale packfiles in its output, which has been corrected.
The server side support for "git fetch" used to show incorrect value for the HEAD symbolic ref when the namespace feature is in use, which has been corrected.
"git am -i --resolved" segfaulted after trying to see a commit as if it were a tree, which has been corrected.
"git bundle verify" needs to see if prerequisite objects exist in the receiving repository, but the command did not check if we are in a repository upfront, which has been corrected.
"git merge --squash" is designed to update the working tree and the index without creating the commit, and this cannot be countermanded by adding the "--commit" option; the command now refuses to work when both options are given.
The data collected by fsmonitor was not properly written back to the on-disk index file, breaking t7519 tests occasionally, which has been corrected.
Update to Unicode 12.1 width table.
The command line to invoke a "git cat-file" command from inside "git p4" was not properly quoted to protect a caret and running a broken command on Windows, which has been corrected.
"git request-pull" learned to warn when the ref we ask them to pull from in the local repository and in the published repository are different.
When creating a partial clone, the object filtering criteria is recorded for the origin of the clone, but this incorrectly used a hardcoded name "origin" to name that remote; it has been corrected to honor the "--origin " option.
"git fetch" into a lazy clone forgot to fetch base objects that are necessary to complete delta in a thin packfile, which has been corrected.
The filter_data used in the list-objects-filter (which manages a lazily sparse clone repository) did not use the dynamic array API correctly---'nr' is supposed to point at one past the last element of the array in use. This has been corrected.
The description about slashes in gitignore patterns (used to indicate things like "anchored to this level only" and "only matches directories") has been revamped.
The URL decoding code has been updated to avoid going past the end of the string while parsing %-- sequence.
The list of for-each like macros used by clang-format has been updated.
"git branch --list" learned to show branches that are checked out in other worktrees connected to the same repository prefixed with '+', similar to the way the currently checked out branch is shown with '*' in front. (merge 6e9381469e nb/branch-show-other-worktrees-head later to maint).
Code restructuring during 2.20 period broke fetching tags via "import" based transports.
The commit-graph file is now part of the "files that the runtime may keep open file descriptors on, all of which would need to be closed when done with the object store", and the file descriptor to an existing commit-graph file now is closed before "gc" finalizes a new instance to replace it.
"git checkout -p" needs to selectively apply a patch in reverse, which did not work well.
Code clean-up to avoid signed integer wraparounds during binary search.
"git interpret-trailers" always treated '#' as the comment character, regardless of core.commentChar setting, which has been corrected.
"git stash show 23" used to work, but no more after getting rewritten in C; this regression has been corrected.
"git rebase --abort" used to leave refs/rewritten/ when concluding "git rebase -r", which has been corrected.
An incorrect list of options was cached after command line completion failed (e.g. trying to complete a command that requires a repository outside one), which has been corrected.
The code to parse scaled numbers out of configuration files has been made more robust and also easier to follow.
The codepath to compute delta islands used to spew progress output without giving the callers any way to squelch it, which has been fixed.
Protocol capabilities that go over wire should never be translated, but it was incorrectly marked for translation, which has been corrected. The output of protocol capabilities for debugging has been tweaked a bit.
Use "Erase in Line" CSI sequence that is already used in the editor support to clear cruft in the progress output.
"git submodule foreach" did not protect command line options passed to the command to be run in each submodule correctly, when the "--recursive" option was in use.
The configuration variable rebase.rescheduleFailedExec should be effective only while running an interactive rebase and should not affect anything when running a non-interactive one, which was not the case. This has been corrected.
The "git clone" documentation refers to command line options in its description in the short form; they have been replaced with long forms to make them more recognisable.
Generation of pack bitmaps are now disabled when .keep files exist, as these are mutually exclusive features. (merge 7328482253 ew/repack-with-bitmaps-by-default later to maint).
"git rm" to resolve a conflicted path leaked an internal message "needs merge" before actually removing the path, which was confusing. This has been corrected.
"git stash --keep-index" did not work correctly on paths that have been removed, which has been fixed. (merge b932f6a5e8 tg/stash-keep-index-with-removed-paths later to maint).
Window 7 update ;-)
A codepath that reads from GPG for signed object verification read past the end of allocated buffer, which has been fixed.
"git clean" silently skipped a path when it cannot lstat() it; now it gives a warning.
"git push --atomic" that goes over the transport-helper (namely, the smart http transport) failed to prevent refs to be pushed when it can locally tell that one of the ref update will fail without having to consult the other end, which has been corrected.
The internal diff machinery can be made to read out of bounds while looking for --function-context line in a corner case, which has been corrected. (merge b777f3fd61 jk/xdiff-clamp-funcname-context-index later to maint).
Other code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc.:
(merge fbec05c210 cc/test-oidmap later to maint).
(merge 7a06fb038c jk/no-system-includes-in-dot-c later to maint).
(merge 81ed2b405c cb/xdiff-no-system-includes-in-dot-c later to maint).
(merge d61e6ce1dd sg/fsck-config-in-doc later to maint).

New in Git 2.21.0 (May 14, 2019)

UI, Workflows & Features:
The "http.version" configuration variable can be used with recent enough versions of cURL library to force the version of HTTP used to talk when fetching and pushing.
Small fixes and features for fast-export and fast-import, mostly on the fast-export side has been made.
"git push $there $src:$dst" rejects when $dst is not a fully qualified refname and it is not clear what the end user meant. The codepath has been taught to give a clearer error message, and also guess where the push should go by taking the type of the pushed object into account (e.g. a tag object would want to go under refs/tags/).
"git checkout [] path..." learned to report the number of paths that have been checked out of the index or the tree-ish, which gives it the same degree of noisy-ness as the case in which the command checks out a branch. "git checkout -m " to undo conflict resolution gives a similar message.
"git quiltimport" learned "--keep-non-patch" option.
"git worktree remove" and "git worktree move" refused to work when there is a submodule involved. This has been loosened to ignore uninitialized submodules.
"git cherry-pick -m1" was forbidden when picking a non-merge commit, even though there _is_ parent number 1 for such a commit. This was done to avoid mistakes back when "cherry-pick" was about picking a single commit, but is no longer useful with "cherry-pick" that can pick a range of commits. Now the "-m$num" option is allowed when picking any commit, as long as $num names an existing parent of the commit.
Update "git multimail" from the upstream.
"git p4" update.
The "--format=" option of for-each-ref, branch and tag learned to show a few more traits of objects that can be learned by the object_info API.
"git rebase -i" learned to re-execute a command given with 'exec' to run after it failed the last time.
"git diff --color-moved-ws" updates.
Custom userformat "log --format" learned %S atom that stands for the tip the traversal reached the commit from, i.e. --source.
"git instaweb" learned to drive http.server that comes with "batteries included" Python installation (both Python2 & 3).
A new encoding UTF-16LE-BOM has been invented to force encoding to UTF-16 with BOM in little endian byte order, which cannot be directly generated by using iconv.
A new date format "--date=human" that morphs its output depending on how far the time is from the current time has been introduced. "--date=auto:human" can be used to use this new format (or any existing format) when the output is going to the pager or to the terminal, and otherwise the default format.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.:
Code clean-up with optimization for the codepath that checks (non-)existence of loose objects.
More codepaths have become aware of working with in-core repository instances other than the default "the_repository".
The "strncat()" function is now among the banned functions.
Portability updates for the HPE NonStop platform.
Earlier we added "-Wformat-security" to developer builds, assuming that "-Wall" (which includes "-Wformat" which in turn is required to use "-Wformat-security") is always in effect. This is not true when config.mak.autogen is in use, unfortunately. This has been fixed by unconditionally adding "-Wall" to developer builds.
The loose object cache used to optimize existence look-up has been updated.
Flaky tests can now be repeatedly run under load with the "--stress" option.
Documentation/Makefile is getting prepared for manpage localization.
"git fetch-pack" now can talk the version 2 protocol.
sha-256 hash has been added and plumbed through the code to allow building Git with the "NewHash".
Debugging help for http transport.
"git fetch --deepen=" has been corrected to work over v2 protocol.
The code to walk tree objects has been taught that we may be working with object names that are not computed with SHA-1.
The in-core repository instances are passed through more codepaths.
Update the protocol message specification to allow only the limited use of scaled quantities. This is to ensure potential compatibility issues will not get out of hand.
Micro-optimize the code that prepares commit objects to be walked by "git rev-list" when the commit-graph is available.
"git fetch" and "git upload-pack" learned to send all exchanges over the sideband channel while talking the v2 protocol.
The codepath to write out commit-graph has been optimized by following the usual pattern of visiting objects in in-pack order.
The codepath to show progress meter while writing out commit-graph file has been improved.
Cocci rules have been updated to encourage use of strbuf_addbuf().
"git rebase --merge" has been reimplemented by reusing the internal machinery used for "git rebase -i".
More code in "git bisect" has been rewritten in C.
Instead of going through "git-rebase--am" scriptlet to use the "am" backend, the built-in version of "git rebase" learned to drive the "am" backend directly.
The assumption to work on the single "in-core index" instance has been reduced from the library-ish part of the codebase.
The test lint learned to catch non-portable "sed" options.
"git pack-objects" learned another algorithm to compute the set of objects to send, that trades the resulting packfile off to save traversal cost to favor small pushes.
The travis CI scripts have been corrected to build Git with the compiler(s) of our choice.
"git submodule update" learned to abort early when core.worktree for the submodule is not set correctly to prevent spreading damage.
Test suite has been adjusted to run on Azure Pipeline.
Running "Documentation/doc-diff x" from anywhere other than the top-level of the working tree did not show the usage string correctly, which has been fixed.
Use of the sparse tool got easier to customize from the command line to help developers.
A new target "coverage-prove" to run the coverage test under "prove" has been added.
A flakey "p4" test has been removed.
The code and tests assume that the system supplied iconv() would always use BOM in its output when asked to encode to UTF-16 (or UTF-32), but apparently some implementations output big-endian without BOM. A compile-time knob has been added to help such systems (e.g. NonStop) to add BOM to the output to increase portability.
Fixes:
Updates for corner cases in merge-recursive. (merge cc4cb0902c en/merge-path-collision later to maint).
"git checkout frotz" (without any double-dash) avoids ambiguity by making sure 'frotz' cannot be interpreted as a revision and as a path at the same time. This safety has been updated to check also a unique remote-tracking branch 'frotz' in a remote, when dwimming to create a local branch 'frotz' out of a remote-tracking branch 'frotz' from a remote. (merge be4908f103 nd/checkout-dwim-fix later to maint).
Refspecs configured with "git -c var=val clone" did not propagate to the resulting repository, which has been corrected. (merge 7eae4a3ac4 sg/clone-initial-fetch-configuration later to maint).
A properly configured username/email is required under user.useConfigOnly in order to create commits; now "git stash" (even though it creates commit objects to represent stash entries) command is exempt from the requirement. (merge 3bc2111fc2 sd/stash-wo-user-name later to maint).
The http-backend CGI process did not correctly clean up the child processes it spawns to run upload-pack etc. when it dies itself, which has been corrected. (merge 02818a98d7 mk/http-backend-kill-children-before-exit later to maint).
"git rev-list --exclude-promisor-objects" had to take an object that does not exist locally (and is lazily available) from the command line without barfing, but the code dereferenced NULL. (merge 4cf67869b2 md/list-lazy-objects-fix later to maint).
The traversal over tree objects has learned to honor ":(attr:label)" pathspec match, which has been implemented only for enumerating paths on the filesystem. (merge 5a0b97b34c nd/attr-pathspec-in-tree-walk later to maint).
BSD port updates. (merge 4e3ecbd439 cb/openbsd-allows-reading-directory later to maint). (merge b6bdc2a0f5 cb/t5004-empty-tar-archive-fix later to maint). (merge 82cbc8cde2 cb/test-lint-cp-a later to maint).
Lines that begin with a certain keyword that come over the wire, as well as lines that consist only of one of these keywords, ought to be painted in color for easier eyeballing, but the latter was broken ever since the feature was introduced in 2.19, which has been corrected. (merge 1f67290450 hn/highlight-sideband-keywords later to maint).
"git log -G" looked for a hunk in the "git log -p" patch output that contained a string that matches the given pattern. Optimize this code to ignore binary files, which by default will not show any hunk that would match any pattern (unless textconv or the --text option is in effect, that is). (merge e0e7cb8080 tb/log-G-binary later to maint).
"git submodule update" ought to use a single job unless asked, but by mistake used multiple jobs, which has been fixed. (merge e3a9d1aca9 sb/submodule-fetchjobs-default-to-one later to maint).
"git stripspace" should be usable outside a git repository, but under the "-s" or "-c" mode, it didn't. (merge 957da75802 jn/stripspace-wo-repository later to maint).
Some of the documentation pages formatted incorrectly with Asciidoctor, which have been fixed. (merge b62eb1d2f4 ma/asciidoctor later to maint).
The core.worktree setting in a submodule repository should not be pointing at a directory when the submodule loses its working tree (e.g. getting deinit'ed), but the code did not properly maintain this invariant.
With zsh, "git cmd path" was completed to "git cmd path name" when the completed path has a special character like SP in it, without any attempt to keep "path name" a single filename. This has been fixed to complete it to "git cmd path name" just like Bash completion does.
The test suite tried to see if it is run under bash, but the check itself failed under some other implementations of shell (notably under NetBSD). This has been corrected. (merge 54ea72f09c sg/test-bash-version-fix later to maint).
"git gc" and "git repack" did not close the open packfiles that they found unneeded before removing them, which didn't work on a platform incapable of removing an open file. This has been corrected. (merge 5bdece0d70 js/gc-repack-close-before-remove later to maint).
The code to drive GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF command relied on the string returned from getenv() to be non-volatile, which is not true, that has been corrected. (merge 6776a84dae kg/external-diff-save-env later to maint).
There were many places the code relied on the string returned from getenv() to be non-volatile, which is not true, that have been corrected. (merge 0da0e9268b jk/save-getenv-result later to maint).
The v2 upload-pack protocol implementation failed to honor hidden-ref configuration, which has been corrected. (merge e20b4192a3 jk/proto-v2-hidden-refs-fix later to maint).
"git fetch --recurse-submodules" may not fetch the necessary commit that is bound to the superproject, which is getting corrected. (merge be76c21282 sb/submodule-recursive-fetch-gets-the-tip later to maint).
"git rebase" internally runs "checkout" to switch between branches, and the command used to call the post-checkout hook, but the reimplementation stopped doing so, which is getting fixed.
"git add -e" got confused when the change it wants to let the user edit is smaller than the previous change that was left over in a temporary file. (merge fa6f225e01 js/add-e-clear-patch-before-stating later to maint).
"git p4" failed to update a shelved change when there were moved files, which has been corrected. (merge 7a10946ab9 ld/git-p4-shelve-update-fix later to maint).
The codepath to read from the commit-graph file attempted to read past the end of it when the file's table-of-contents was corrupt.
The compat/obstack code had casts that -Wcast-function-type compilation option found questionable. (merge 764473d257 sg/obstack-cast-function-type-fix later to maint).
An obvious typo in an assertion error message has been fixed. (merge 3c27e2e059 cc/test-ref-store-typofix later to maint).
In Git for Windows, "git clone \serversharepath" etc. that uses UNC paths from command line had bad interaction with its shell emulation.
"git add --ignore-errors" did not work as advertised and instead worked as an unintended synonym for "git add --renormalize", which has been fixed. (merge e2c2a37545 jk/add-ignore-errors-bit-assignment-fix later to maint).
On a case-insensitive filesystem, we failed to compare the part of the path that is above the worktree directory in an absolute pathname, which has been corrected.
Asking "git check-attr" about a macro (e.g. "binary") on a specific path did not work correctly, even though "git check-attr -a" listed such a macro correctly. This has been corrected. (merge 7b95849be4 jk/attr-macro-fix later to maint).
"git pack-objects" incorrectly used uninitialized mutex, which has been corrected. (merge edb673cf10 ph/pack-objects-mutex-fix later to maint).
"git checkout -b [HEAD]" to create a new branch from the current commit and check it out ought to be a no-op in the index and the working tree in normal cases, but there are corner cases that do require updates to the index and the working tree. Running it immediately after "git clone --no-checkout" is one of these cases that an earlier optimization kicked in incorrectly, which has been fixed. (merge 8424bfd45b bp/checkout-new-branch-optim later to maint).
"git diff --color-moved --cc --stat -p" did not work well due to funny interaction between a bug in color-moved and the rest, which has been fixed. (merge dac03b5518 jk/diff-cc-stat-fixes later to maint).
When GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR is set, the command was incorrectly started when modes of "git rebase" that implicitly uses the machinery for the interactive rebase are run, which has been corrected. (merge 891d4a0313 pw/no-editor-in-rebase-i-implicit later to maint).
The commit-graph facility did not work when in-core objects that are promoted from unknown type to commit (e.g. a commit that is accessed via a tag that refers to it) were involved, which has been corrected. (merge 4468d4435c sg/object-as-type-commit-graph-fix later to maint).
"git fetch" output cleanup. (merge dc40b24df4 nd/fetch-compact-update later to maint).
"git cat-file --batch" reported a dangling symbolic link by mistake, when it wanted to report that a given name is ambiguous.
Documentation around core.crlf has been updated. (merge c9446f0504 jk/autocrlf-overrides-eol-doc later to maint).
The documentation of "git commit-tree" said that the command understands "--gpg-sign" in addition to "-S", but the command line parser did not know about the longhand, which has been corrected.
"git rebase -x $cmd" did not reject multi-line command, even though the command is incapable of handling such a command. It now is rejected upfront. (merge c762aada1a pw/rebase-x-sanity-check later to maint).
Output from "git help" was not correctly aligned, which has been fixed. (merge 6195a76da4 nd/help-align-command-desc later to maint).
The "git submodule summary" subcommand showed shortened commit object names by mechanically truncating them at 7-hexdigit, which has been improved to let "rev-parse --short" scale the length of the abbreviation with the size of the repository. (merge 0586a438f6 sh/submodule-summary-abbrev-fix later to maint).
The way the OSX build jobs updates its build environment used the "--quiet" option to "brew update" command, but it wasn't all that quiet to be useful. The use of the option has been replaced with an explicit redirection to the /dev/null (which incidentally would have worked around a breakage by recent updates to homebrew, which has fixed itself already). (merge a1ccaedd62 sg/travis-osx-brew-breakage-workaround later to maint).
"git --work-tree=$there --git-dir=$here describe --dirty" did not work correctly as it did not pay attention to the location of the worktree specified by the user by mistake, which has been corrected. (merge c801170b0c ss/describe-dirty-in-the-right-directory later to maint).
"git fetch" over protocol v2 that needs to make a second connection to backfill tags did not clear a variable that holds shallow repository information correctly, leading to an access of freed piece of memory.
Some errors from the other side coming over smart HTTP transport were not noticed, which has been corrected.

New in Git 2.20.1 (Feb 25, 2019)

New in Git 2.19.2 (Dec 10, 2018)

Fixed:
"git interpret-trailers" and its underlying machinery had a buggy code that attempted to ignore patch text after commit log message, which triggered in various codepaths that will always get the log message alone and never get such an input.
"git rebase -i" did not clear the state files correctly when a run of "squash/fixup" is aborted and then the user manually amended the commit instead, which has been corrected.
When fsmonitor is in use, after operation on submodules updates .gitmodules, we lost track of the fact that we did so and relied on stale fsmonitor data.
Fix for a long-standing bug that leaves the index file corrupt when it shrinks during a partial commit.
Further fix for O_APPEND emulation on Windows
A corner case bugfix in "git rerere" code.
"git add ':(attr:foo)'" is not supported and is supposed to be rejected while the command line arguments are parsed, but we fail to reject such a command line upfront.
"git rebase" etc. in Git 2.19 fails to abort when given an empty commit log message as result of editing, which has been corrected.
The code to backfill objects in lazily cloned repository did not work correctly, which has been corrected.
Update error messages given by "git remote" and make them consistent.
"git update-ref" learned to make both "--no-deref" and "--stdin" work at the same time.
Recently added "range-diff" had a corner-case bug to cause it segfault, which has been corrected.
The recently introduced commit-graph auxiliary data is incompatible with mechanisms such as replace & grafts that "breaks" immutable nature of the object reference relationship. Disable optimizations based on its use (and updating existing commit-graph) when these incompatible features are in use in the repository.
The mailmap file update.
The code in "git status" sometimes hit an assertion failure. This was caused by a structure that was reused without cleaning the data used for the first run, which has been corrected.
A corner-case bugfix.
A partial clone that is configured to lazily fetch missing objects will on-demand issue a "git fetch" request to the originating repository to fill not-yet-obtained objects. The request has been optimized for requesting a tree object (and not the leaf blob objects contained in it) by telling the originating repository that no blobs are needed.
The codepath to support the experimental split-index mode had remaining "racily clean" issues fixed.
"git log --graph" showing an octopus merge sometimes miscounted the number of display columns it is consuming to show the merge and its parent commits, which has been corrected.
The implementation of run_command() API on the UNIX platforms had a bug that caused a command not on $PATH to be found in the current directory.
A mutex used in "git pack-objects" were not correctly initialized and this caused "git repack" to dump core on Windows.
Under certain circumstances, "git diff D:/a/b/c D:/a/b/d" on Windows would strip initial parts from the paths because they were not recognized as absolute, which has been corrected.
The receive.denyCurrentBranch=updateInstead codepath kicked in even when the push should have been rejected due to other reasons, such as it does not fast-forward or the update-hook rejects it, which has been corrected.
"git repack" in a shallow clone did not correctly update the shallow points in the repository, leading to a repository that does not pass fsck.
Operations on promisor objects make sense in the context of only a small subset of the commands that internally use the revisions machinery, but the "--exclude-promisor-objects" option were taken and led to nonsense results by commands like "log", to which it didn't make much sense. This has been corrected.
The "container" mode of TravisCI is going away. Our .travis.yml file is getting prepared for the transition.
Our test scripts can now take the '-V' option as a synonym for the '--verbose-log' option.
A regression in Git 2.12 era made "git fsck" fall into an infinite loop while processing truncated loose objects.

New in Git 2.19.1 (Oct 19, 2018)

New in Git 2.19 RC 0 (Aug 21, 2018)

UI, Workflows & Features:
"git diff" compares the index and the working tree. For paths added with intent-to-add bit, the command shows the full contents of them as added, but the paths themselves were not marked as new files. They are now shown as new by default.
"git apply" learned the "--intent-to-add" option so that an otherwise working-tree-only application of a patch will add new paths to the index marked with the "intent-to-add" bit.
"git grep" learned the "--column" option that gives not just the line number but the column number of the hit.
The "-l" option in "git branch -l" is an unfortunate short-hand for "--create-reflog", but many users, both old and new, somehow expect it to be something else, perhaps "--list". This step warns when "-l" is used as a short-hand for "--create-reflog" and warns about the future repurposing of the it when it is used.
The userdiff pattern for .php has been updated.
The content-transfer-encoding of the message "git send-email" sends out by default was 8bit, which can cause trouble when there is an overlong line to bust RFC 5322/2822 limit. A new option 'auto' to automatically switch to quoted-printable when there is such a line in the payload has been introduced and is made the default.
"git checkout" and "git worktree add" learned to honor checkout.defaultRemote when auto-vivifying a local branch out of a remote tracking branch in a repository with multiple remotes that have tracking branches that share the same names. (merge 8d7b558bae ab/checkout-default-remote later to maint).
"git grep" learned the "--only-matching" option.
"git rebase --rebase-merges" mode now handles octopus merges as well.
Add a server-side knob to skip commits in exponential/fibbonacci stride in an attempt to cover wider swath of history with a smaller number of iterations, potentially accepting a larger packfile transfer, instead of going back one commit a time during common ancestor discovery during the "git fetch" transaction. (merge 42cc7485a2 jt/fetch-negotiator-skipping later to maint).
A new configuration variable core.usereplacerefs has been added, primarily to help server installations that want to ignore the replace mechanism altogether.
Teach "git tag -s" etc. a few configuration variables (gpg.format that can be set to "openpgp" or "x509", and gpg..program that is used to specify what program to use to deal with the format) to allow x.509 certs with CMS via "gpgsm" to be used instead of openpgp via "gnupg".
Many more strings are prepared for l10n.
"git p4 submit" learns to ask its own pre-submit hook if it should continue with submitting.
The test performed at the receiving end of "git push" to prevent bad objects from entering repository can be customized via receive.fsck.* configuration variables; we now have gained a counterpart to do the same on the "git fetch" side, with fetch.fsck.* configuration variables.
"git pull --rebase=interactive" learned "i" as a short-hand for "interactive".
"git instaweb" has been adjusted to run better with newer Apache on RedHat based distros.
"git range-diff" is a reimplementation of "git tbdiff" that lets us compare individual patches in two iterations of a topic.
The sideband code learned to optionally paint selected keywords at the beginning of incoming lines on the receiving end.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
The bulk of "git submodule foreach" has been rewritten in C.
The in-core "commit" object had an all-purpose "void *util" field, which was tricky to use especially in library-ish part of the code. All of the existing uses of the field has been migrated to a more dedicated "commit-slab" mechanism and the field is eliminated.
A less often used command "git show-index" has been modernized. (merge fb3010c31f jk/show-index later to maint).
The conversion to pass "the_repository" and then "a_repository" throughout the object access API continues.
Continuing with the idea to programatically enumerate various pieces of data required for command line completion, teach the codebase to report the list of configuration variables subcommands care about to help complete them.
Separate "rebase -p" codepath out of "rebase -i" implementation to slim down the latter and make it easier to manage.
Make refspec parsing codepath more robust.
Some flaky tests have been fixed.
Continuing with the idea to programmatically enumerate various pieces of data required for command line completion, the codebase has been taught to enumerate options prefixed with "--no-" to negate them.
Build and test procedure for netrc credential helper (in contrib/) has been updated.
The conversion to pass "the_repository" and then "a_repository" throughout the object access API continues.
Remove unused function definitions and declarations from ewah bitmap subsystem.
Code preparation to make "git p4" closer to be usable with Python 3.
Tighten the API to make it harder to misuse in-tree .gitmodules file, even though it shares the same syntax with configuration files, to read random configuration items from it.
"git fast-import" has been updated to avoid attempting to create delta against a zero-byte-long string, which is pointless.
The codebase has been updated to compile cleanly with -pedantic option. (merge 2b647a05d7 bb/pedantic later to maint).
The character display width table has been updated to match the latest Unicode standard. (merge 570951eea2 bb/unicode-11-width later to maint).
test-lint now looks for broken use of "VAR=VAL shell_func" in test scripts.
Conversion from uchar[40] to struct object_id continues.
Recent "security fix" to pay attention to contents of ".gitmodules" while accepting "git push" was a bit overly strict than necessary, which has been adjusted.
"git fsck" learns to make sure the optional commit-graph file is in a sane state.
"git diff --color-moved" feature has further been tweaked.
Code restructuring and a small fix to transport protocol v2 during fetching.
Parsing of -L[][,[]] parameters "git blame" and "git log" take has been tweaked.
lookup_commit_reference() and friends have been updated to find in-core object for a specific in-core repository instance.
Various glitches in the heuristics of merge-recursive strategy have been documented in new tests.
"git fetch" learned a new option "--negotiation-tip" to limit the set of commits it tells the other end as "have", to reduce wasted bandwidth and cycles, which would be helpful when the receiving repository has a lot of refs that have little to do with the history at the remote it is fetching from.
For a large tree, the index needs to hold many cache entries allocated on heap. These cache entries are now allocated out of a dedicated memory pool to amortize malloc(3) overhead.
Tests to cover various conflicting cases have been added for merge-recursive.
Tests to cover conflict cases that involve submodules have been added for merge-recursive.
Look for broken "&&" chains that are hidden in subshell, many of which have been found and corrected.
The singleton commit-graph in-core instance is made per in-core repository instance.
"make DEVELOPER=1 DEVOPTS=pedantic" allows developers to compile with -pedantic option, which may catch more problematic program constructs and potential bugs.
Preparatory code to later add json output for telemetry data has been added.
Update the way we use Coccinelle to find out-of-style code that need to be modernised.
It is too easy to misuse system API functions such as strcat(); these selected functions are now forbidden in this codebase and will cause a compilation failure.
Add a script (in contrib/) to help users of VSCode work better with our codebase.
The Travis CI scripts were taught to ship back the test data from failed tests. (merge aea8879a6a sg/travis-retrieve-trash-upon-failure later to maint).
The parse-options machinery learned to refrain from enclosing placeholder string inside a "" pair automatically without PARSE_OPT_LITERAL_ARGHELP. Existing help text for option arguments that are not formatted correctly have been identified and fixed. (merge 5f0df44cd7 rs/parse-opt-lithelp later to maint).
Noiseword "extern" has been removed from function decls in the header files.
A few atoms like %(objecttype) and %(objectsize) in the format specifier of "for-each-ref --format=" can be filled without getting the full contents of the object, but just with the object header. These cases have been optimized by calling oid_object_info() API (instead of reading and inspecting the data).
The end result of documentation update has been made to be inspected more easily to help developers.
The API to iterate over all objects learned to optionally list objects in the order they appear in packfiles, which helps locality of access if the caller accesses these objects while as objects are enumerated.
Improve built-in facility to catch broken &&-chain in the tests.
The more library-ish parts of the codebase learned to work on the in-core index-state instance that is passed in by their callers, instead of always working on the singleton "the_index" instance.
A test prerequisite defined by various test scripts with slightly different semantics has been consolidated into a single copy and made into a lazily defined one. (merge 6ec633059a wc/make-funnynames-shared-lazy-prereq later to maint).
After a partial clone, repeated fetches from promisor remote would have accumulated many packfiles marked with .promisor bit without getting them coalesced into fewer packfiles, hurting performance. "git repack" now learned to repack them.
Fixes:
"git remote update" can take both a single remote nickname and a nickname for remote groups, and the completion script (in contrib/) has been taught about it. (merge 9cd4382ad5 ls/complete-remote-update-names later to maint).
"git fetch --shallow-since=" that specifies the cut-off point that is newer than the existing history used to end up grabbing the entire history. Such a request now errors out. (merge e34de73c56 nd/reject-empty-shallow-request later to maint).
Fix for 2.17-era regression around `core.safecrlf`. (merge 6cb09125be as/safecrlf-quiet-fix later to maint).
The recent addition of "partial clone" experimental feature kicked in when it shouldn't, namely, when there is no partial-clone filter defined even if extensions.partialclone is set. (merge cac1137dc4 jh/partial-clone later to maint).
"git send-pack --signed" (hence "git push --signed" over the http transport) did not read user ident from the config mechanism to determine whom to sign the push certificate as, which has been corrected. (merge d067d98887 ms/send-pack-honor-config later to maint).
"git fetch-pack --all" used to unnecessarily fail upon seeing an annotated tag that points at an object other than a commit. (merge c12c9df527 jk/fetch-all-peeled-fix later to maint).
When user edits the patch in "git add -p" and the user's editor is set to strip trailing whitespaces indiscriminately, an empty line that is unchanged in the patch would become completely empty (instead of a line with a sole SP on it). The code introduced in Git 2.17 timeframe failed to parse such a patch, but now it learned to notice the situation and cope with it. (merge f4d35a6b49 pw/add-p-recount later to maint).
The code to try seeing if a fetch is necessary in a submodule during a fetch with --recurse-submodules got confused when the path to the submodule was changed in the range of commits in the superproject, sometimes showing "(null)". This has been corrected.
"git submodule" did not correctly adjust core.worktree setting that indicates whether/where a submodule repository has its associated working tree across various state transitions, which has been corrected. (merge 984cd77ddb sb/submodule-core-worktree later to maint).
Bugfix for "rebase -i" corner case regression. (merge a9279c6785 pw/rebase-i-keep-reword-after-conflict later to maint).
Recently added "--base" option to "git format-patch" command did not correctly generate prereq patch ids. (merge 15b76c1fb3 xy/format-patch-prereq-patch-id-fix later to maint).
POSIX portability fix in Makefile to fix a glitch introduced a few releases ago. (merge 6600054e9b dj/runtime-prefix later to maint).
"git filter-branch" when used with the "--state-branch" option still attempted to rewrite the commits whose filtered result is known from the previous attempt (which is recorded on the state branch); the command has been corrected not to waste cycles doing so. (merge 709cfe848a mb/filter-branch-optim later to maint).
Clarify that setting core.ignoreCase to deviate from reality would not turn a case-incapable filesystem into a case-capable one. (merge 48294b512a ms/core-icase-doc later to maint).
"fsck.skipList" did not prevent a blob object listed there from being inspected for is contents (e.g. we recently started to inspect the contents of ".gitmodules" for certain malicious patterns), which has been corrected. (merge fb16287719 rj/submodule-fsck-skip later to maint).
"git checkout --recurse-submodules another-branch" did not report in which submodule it failed to update the working tree, which resulted in an unhelpful error message. (merge ba95d4e4bd sb/submodule-move-head-error-msg later to maint).
"git rebase" behaved slightly differently depending on which one of the three backends gets used; this has been documented and an effort to make them more uniform has begun. (merge b00bf1c9a8 en/rebase-consistency later to maint).
The "--ignore-case" option of "git for-each-ref" (and its friends) did not work correctly, which has been fixed. (merge e674eb2528 jk/for-each-ref-icase later to maint).
"git fetch" failed to correctly validate the set of objects it received when making a shallow history deeper, which has been corrected. (merge cf1e7c0770 jt/connectivity-check-after-unshallow later to maint).
Partial clone support of "git clone" has been updated to correctly validate the objects it receives from the other side. The server side has been corrected to send objects that are directly requested, even if they may match the filtering criteria (e.g. when doing a "lazy blob" partial clone). (merge a7e67c11b8 jt/partial-clone-fsck-connectivity later to maint).
Handling of an empty range by "git cherry-pick" was inconsistent depending on how the range ended up to be empty, which has been corrected. (merge c5e358d073 jk/empty-pick-fix later to maint).
"git reset --merge" (hence "git merge ---abort") and "git reset --hard" had trouble working correctly in a sparsely checked out working tree after a conflict, which has been corrected. (merge b33fdfc34c mk/merge-in-sparse-checkout later to maint).
Correct a broken use of "VAR=VAL shell_func" in a test. (merge 650161a277 jc/t3404-one-shot-export-fix later to maint).
"git rev-parse ':/substring'" did not consider the history leading only to HEAD when looking for a commit with the given substring, when the HEAD is detached. This has been fixed. (merge 6b3351e799 wc/find-commit-with-pattern-on-detached-head later to maint).
Build doc update for Windows. (merge ede8d89bb1 nd/command-list later to maint).
core.commentchar is now honored when preparing the list of commits to replay in "rebase -i".
"git pull --rebase" on a corrupt HEAD caused a segfault. In general we substitute an empty tree object when running the in-core equivalent of the diff-index command, and the codepath has been corrected to do so as well to fix this issue. (merge 3506dc9445 jk/has-uncommitted-changes-fix later to maint).
httpd tests saw occasional breakage due to the way its access log gets inspected by the tests, which has been updated to make them less flaky. (merge e8b3b2e275 sg/httpd-test-unflake later to maint).
Tests to cover more D/F conflict cases have been added for merge-recursive.
"git gc --auto" opens file descriptors for the packfiles before spawning "git repack/prune", which would upset Windows that does not want a process to work on a file that is open by another process. The issue has been worked around. (merge 12e73a3ce4 kg/gc-auto-windows-workaround later to maint).
The recursive merge strategy did not properly ensure there was no change between HEAD and the index before performing its operation, which has been corrected. (merge 55f39cf755 en/dirty-merge-fixes later to maint).
"git rebase" started exporting GIT_DIR environment variable and exposing it to hook scripts when part of it got rewritten in C. Instead of matching the old scripted Porcelains' behaviour, compensate by also exporting GIT_WORK_TREE environment as well to lessen the damage. This can harm existing hooks that want to operate on different repository, but the current behaviour is already broken for them anyway. (merge ab5e67d751 bc/sequencer-export-work-tree-as-well later to maint).
"git send-email" when using in a batched mode that limits the number of messages sent in a single SMTP session lost the contents of the variable used to choose between tls/ssl, unable to send the second and later batches, which has been fixed. (merge 636f3d7ac5 jm/send-email-tls-auth-on-batch later to maint).
The lazy clone support had a few places where missing but promised objects were not correctly tolerated, which have been fixed.
One of the "diff --color-moved" mode "dimmed_zebra" that was named in an unusual way has been deprecated and replaced by "dimmed-zebra". (merge e3f2f5f9cd es/diff-color-moved-fix later to maint).
The wire-protocol v2 relies on the client to send "ref prefixes" to limit the bandwidth spent on the initial ref advertisement. "git clone" when learned to speak v2 forgot to do so, which has been corrected. (merge 402c47d939 bw/clone-ref-prefixes later to maint).
"git diff --histogram" had a bad memory usage pattern, which has been rearranged to reduce the peak usage. (merge 79cb2ebb92 sb/histogram-less-memory later to maint).
Code clean-up to use size_t/ssize_t when they are the right type. (merge 7726d360b5 jk/size-t later to maint).
The wire-protocol v2 relies on the client to send "ref prefixes" to limit the bandwidth spent on the initial ref advertisement. "git fetch $remote branch:branch" that asks tags that point into the history leading to the "branch" automatically followed sent to narrow prefix and broke the tag following, which has been fixed. (merge 2b554353a5 jt/tag-following-with-proto-v2-fix later to maint).
When the sparse checkout feature is in use, "git cherry-pick" and other mergy operations lost the skip_worktree bit when a path that is excluded from checkout requires content level merge, which is resolved as the same as the HEAD version, without materializing the merge result in the working tree, which made the path appear as deleted. This has been corrected by preserving the skip_worktree bit (and not materializing the file in the working tree). (merge 2b75fb601c en/merge-recursive-skip-fix later to maint).
The "author-script" file "git rebase -i" creates got broken when we started to move the command away from shell script, which is getting fixed now. (merge 5522bbac20 es/rebase-i-author-script-fix later to maint).
The automatic tree-matching in "git merge -s subtree" was broken 5 years ago and nobody has noticed since then, which is now fixed. (merge 2ec4150713 jk/merge-subtree-heuristics later to maint).
"git fetch $there refs/heads/s" ought to fetch the tip of the branch 's', but when "refs/heads/refs/heads/s", i.e. a branch whose name is "refs/heads/s" exists at the same time, fetched that one instead by mistake. This has been corrected to honor the usual disambiguation rules for abbreviated refnames. (merge 60650a48c0 jt/refspec-dwim-precedence-fix later to maint).
Futureproofing a helper function that can easily be misused. (merge 65bb21e77e es/want-color-fd-defensive later to maint).
The http-backend (used for smart-http transport) used to slurp the whole input until EOF, without paying attention to CONTENT_LENGTH that is supplied in the environment and instead expecting the Web server to close the input stream. This has been fixed. (merge eebfe40962 mk/http-backend-content-length later to maint).
"git merge --abort" etc. did not clean things up properly when there were conflicted entries in the index in certain order that are involved in D/F conflicts. This has been corrected. (merge ad3762042a en/abort-df-conflict-fixes later to maint).
"git diff --indent-heuristic" had a bad corner case performance. (merge 301ef85401 sb/indent-heuristic-optim later to maint).
The "--exec" option to "git rebase --rebase-merges" placed the exec commands at wrong places, which has been corrected.
"git verify-tag" and "git verify-commit" have been taught to use the exit status of underlying "gpg --verify" to signal bad or untrusted signature they found. (merge 4e5dc9ca17 jc/gpg-status later to maint).
"git mergetool" stopped and gave an extra prompt to continue after the last path has been handled, which did not make much sense. (merge d651a54b8a ng/mergetool-lose-final-prompt later to maint).
Among the three codepaths we use O_APPEND to open a file for appending, one used for writing GIT_TRACE output requires O_APPEND implementation that behaves sensibly when multiple processes are writing to the same file. POSIX emulation used in the Windows port has been updated to improve in this area. (merge d641097589 js/mingw-o-append later to maint).
"git pull --rebase -v" in a repository with a submodule barfed as an intermediate process did not understand what "-v(erbose)" flag meant, which has been fixed. (merge e84c3cf3dc sb/pull-rebase-submodule later to maint).
Recent update to "git config" broke updating variable in a subsection, which has been corrected. (merge bff7df7a87 sb/config-write-fix later to maint).
When "git rebase -i" is told to squash two or more commits into one, it labeled the log message for each commit with its number. It correctly called the first one "1st commit", but the next one was "commit #1", which was off-by-one. This has been corrected. (merge dd2e36ebac pw/rebase-i-squash-number-fix later to maint).
"git rebase -i", when a 'merge ' insn in its todo list fails, segfaulted, which has been (minimally) corrected. (merge bc9238bb09 pw/rebase-i-merge-segv-fix later to maint).
"git cherry-pick --quit" failed to remove CHERRY_PICK_HEAD even though we won't be in a cherry-pick session after it returns, which has been corrected. (merge 3e7dd99208 nd/cherry-pick-quit-fix later to maint).
Code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc.

New in Git 2.18.0 (Jun 22, 2018)

UI, Workflows & Features:
Rename detection logic that is used in "merge" and "cherry-pick" has learned to guess when all of x/a, x/b and x/c have moved to z/a, z/b and z/c, it is likely that x/d added in the meantime would also want to move to z/d by taking the hint that the entire directory 'x' moved to 'z'. A bug causing dirty files involved in a rename to be overwritten during merge has also been fixed as part of this work. Incidentally, this also avoids updating a file in the working tree after a (non-trivial) merge whose result matches what our side originally had.
"git filter-branch" learned to use a different exit code to allow the callers to tell the case where there was no new commits to rewrite from other error cases.
When built with more recent cURL, GIT_SSL_VERSION can now specify "tlsv1.3" as its value.
"git gui" learned that "~/.ssh/id_ecdsa.pub" and "~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub" are also possible SSH key files. (merge 2e2f0288ef bb/git-gui-ssh-key-files later to maint).
"git gui" performs commit upon CTRL/CMD+ENTER but the CTRL/CMD+KP_ENTER (i.e. enter key on the numpad) did not have the same key binding. It now does. (merge 28a1d94a06 bp/git-gui-bind-kp-enter later to maint).
"git gui" has been taught to work with old versions of tk (like 8.5.7) that do not support "ttk::style theme use" as a way to query the current theme. (merge 4891961105 cb/git-gui-ttk-style later to maint).
"git rebase" has learned to honor "--signoff" option when using backends other than "am" (but not "--preserve-merges").
"git branch --list" during an interrupted "rebase -i" now lets users distinguish the case where a detached HEAD is being rebased and a normal branch is being rebased.
"git mergetools" learned talking to guiffy.
The scripts in contrib/emacs/ have outlived their usefulness and have been replaced with a stub that errors out and tells the user there are replacements.
The new "working-tree-encoding" attribute can ask Git to convert the contents to the specified encoding when checking out to the working tree (and the other way around when checking in).
The "git config" command uses separate options e.g. "--int", "--bool", etc. to specify what type the caller wants the value to be interpreted as. A new "--type=" option has been introduced, which would make it cleaner to define new types.
"git config --get" learned the "--default" option, to help the calling script. Building on top of the above changes, the "git config" learns "--type=color" type. Taken together, you can do things like "git config --get foo.color --default blue" and get the ANSI color sequence for the color given to foo.color variable, or "blue" if the variable does not exist.
"git ls-remote" learned an option to allow sorting its output based on the refnames being shown.
The command line completion (in contrib/) has been taught that "git stash save" has been deprecated ("git stash push" is the preferred spelling in the new world) and does not offer it as a possible completion candidate when "git stash push" can be.
"git gc --prune=nonsense" spent long time repacking and then silently failed when underlying "git prune --expire=nonsense" failed to parse its command line. This has been corrected.
Error messages from "git push" can be painted for more visibility.
"git http-fetch" (deprecated) had an optional and experimental "feature" to fetch only commits and/or trees, which nobody used. This has been removed.
The functionality of "$GIT_DIR/info/grafts" has been superseded by the "refs/replace/" mechanism for some time now, but the internal code had support for it in many places, which has been cleaned up in order to drop support of the "grafts" mechanism.
"git worktree add" learned to check out an existing branch.
"git --no-pager cmd" did not have short-and-sweet single letter option. Now it does as "-P". (merge 7213c28818 js/no-pager-shorthand later to maint).
"git rebase" learned "--rebase-merges" to transplant the whole topology of commit graph elsewhere.
"git status" learned to pay attention to UI related diff configuration variables such as diff.renames.
The command line completion mechanism (in contrib/) learned to load custom completion file for "git $command" where $command is a custom "git-$command" that the end user has on the $PATH when using newer version of bash-completion.
"git send-email" can sometimes offer confirmation dialog "Send this email?" with choices 'Yes', 'No', 'Quit', and 'All'. A new action 'Edit' has been added to this dialog's choice.
With merge.renames configuration set to false, the recursive merge strategy can be told not to spend cycles trying to find renamed paths and merge them accordingly.
"git status" learned to honor a new status.renames configuration to skip rename detection, which could be useful for those who want to do so without disabling the default rename detection done by the "git diff" command.
Command line completion (in contrib/) learned to complete pathnames for various commands better.
"git blame" learns to unhighlight uninteresting metadata from the originating commit on lines that are the same as the previous one, and also paint lines in different colors depending on the age of the commit.
Transfer protocol v2 learned to support the partial clone.
When a short hexadecimal string is used to name an object but there are multiple objects that share the string as the prefix of their names, the code lists these ambiguous candidates in a help message. These object names are now sorted according to their types for easier eyeballing.
"git fetch $there $refspec" that talks over protocol v2 can take advantage of server-side ref filtering; the code has been extended so that this mechanism triggers also when fetching with configured refspec.
Our HTTP client code used to advertise that we accept gzip encoding from the other side; instead, just let cURL library to advertise and negotiate the best one.
"git p4" learned to "unshelve" shelved commit from P4. (merge 123f631761 ld/p4-unshelve later to maint).
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
A "git fetch" from a repository with insane number of refs into a repository that is already up-to-date still wasted too many cycles making many lstat(2) calls to see if these objects at the tips exist as loose objects locally. These lstat(2) calls are optimized away by enumerating all loose objects beforehand. It is unknown if the new strategy negatively affects existing use cases, fetching into a repository with many loose objects from a repository with small number of refs.
Git can be built to use either v1 or v2 of the PCRE library, and so far, the build-time configuration USE_LIBPCRE=YesPlease instructed the build procedure to use v1, but now it means v2. USE_LIBPCRE1 and USE_LIBPCRE2 can be used to explicitly choose which version to use, as before.
The build procedure learned to optionally use symbolic links (instead of hardlinks and copies) to install "git-foo" for built-in commands, whose binaries are all identical.
Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
The way "git worktree prune" worked internally has been simplified, by assuming how "git worktree move" moves an existing worktree to a different place.
Code clean-up for the "repository" abstraction. (merge 00a3da2a13 nd/remove-ignore-env-field later to maint).
Code to find the length to uniquely abbreviate object names based on packfile content, which is a relatively recent addtion, has been optimized to use the same fan-out table.
The mechanism to use parse-options API to automate the command line completion continues to get extended and polished.
Copies of old scripted Porcelain commands in contrib/examples/ have been removed.
Some tests that rely on the exact hardcoded values of object names have been updated in preparation for hash function migration.
Perf-test update.
Test helper update.
The effort continues to refactor the internal global data structure to make it possible to open multiple repositories, work with and then close them,
Small test-helper programs have been consolidated into a single binary.
API clean-up around ref-filter code.
Shell completion (in contrib) that gives list of paths have been optimized somewhat.
The index file is updated to record the fsmonitor section after a full scan was made, to avoid wasting the effort that has already spent.
Performance measuring framework in t/perf learned to help bisecting performance regressions.
Some multi-word source filenames are being renamed to separate words with dashes instead of underscores.
An reusable "memory pool" implementation has been extracted from fast-import.c, which in turn has become the first user of the mem-pool API.
A build-time option has been added to allow Git to be told to refer to its associated files relative to the main binary, in the same way that has been possible on Windows for quite some time, for Linux, BSDs and Darwin.
Precompute and store information necessary for ancestry traversal in a separate file to optimize graph walking.
The effort to pass the repository in-core structure throughout the API continues. This round deals with the code that implements the refs/replace/ mechanism.
The build procedure "make DEVELOPER=YesPlease" learned to enable a bit more warning options depending on the compiler used to help developers more. There also is "make DEVOPTS=tokens" knob available now, for those who want to help fixing warnings we usually ignore, for example.
A new version of the transport protocol is being worked on.
The code to interface to GPG has been restructured somewhat to make it cleaner to integrate with other types of signature systems later.
The code has been taught to use the duplicated information stored in the commit-graph file to learn the tree object name for a commit to avoid opening and parsing the commit object when it makes sense to do so.
"git gc" in a large repository takes a lot of time as it considers to repack all objects into one pack by default. The command has been taught to pretend as if the largest existing packfile is marked with ".keep" so that it is left untouched while objects in other packs and loose ones are repacked.
The transport protocol v2 is getting updated further.
The codepath around object-info API has been taught to take the repository object (which in turn tells the API which object store the objects are to be located).
"git pack-objects" needs to allocate tons of "struct object_entry" while doing its work, and shrinking its size helps the performance quite a bit.
The implementation of "git rebase -i --root" has been updated to use the sequencer machinery more.
Developer support update, by using BUG() macro instead of die() to mark codepaths that should not happen more clearly.
Developer support. Use newer GCC on one of the builds done at TravisCI.org to get more warnings and errors diagnosed.
Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
By code restructuring of submodule merge in merge-recursive, informational messages from the codepath are now given using the same mechanism as other output, and honor the merge.verbosity configuration. The code also learned to give a few new messages when a submodule three-way merge resolves cleanly when one side records a descendant of the commit chosen by the other side.
Avoid unchecked snprintf() to make future code auditing easier. (merge ac4896f007 jk/snprintf-truncation later to maint).
Many tests hardcode the raw object names, which would change once we migrate away from SHA-1. While some of them must test against exact object names, most of them do not have to use hardcoded constants in the test. The latter kind of tests have been updated to test the moral equivalent of the original without hardcoding the actual object names.
The list of commands with their various attributes were spread across a few places in the build procedure, but it now is getting a bit more consolidated to allow more automation.
Quite a many tests assumed that newly created refs are made as loose refs using the files backend, which have been updated to use proper plumbing like rev-parse and update-ref, to avoid breakage once we start using different ref backends.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes since v2.17:
"git shortlog cruft" aborted with a BUG message when run outside a Git repository. The command has been taught to complain about extra and unwanted arguments on its command line instead in such a case. (merge 4aa0161e83 ma/shortlog-revparse later to maint).
"git stash push -u -- " gave an unnecessary and confusing error message when there was no tracked files that match the , which has been fixed. (merge 353278687e tg/stash-untracked-with-pathspec-fix later to maint).
"git tag --contains no-such-commit" gave a full list of options after giving an error message. (merge 3bb0923f06 ps/contains-id-error-message later to maint).
"diff-highlight" filter (in contrib/) learned to understand "git log --graph" output better. (merge 4551fbba14 jk/diff-highlight-graph-fix later to maint).
when refs that do not point at committish are given, "git filter-branch" gave a misleading error messages. This has been corrected. (merge f78ab355e7 yk/filter-branch-non-committish-refs later to maint).
"git submodule status" misbehaved on a submodule that has been removed from the working tree. (merge 74b6bda32f rs/status-with-removed-submodule later to maint).
When credential helper exits very quickly without reading its input, it used to cause Git to die with SIGPIPE, which has been fixed. (merge a0d51e8d0e eb/cred-helper-ignore-sigpipe later to maint).
"git rebase --keep-empty" still removed an empty commit if the other side contained an empty commit (due to the "does an equivalent patch exist already?" check), which has been corrected. (merge 3d946165e1 pw/rebase-keep-empty-fixes later to maint).
Some codepaths, including the refs API, get and keep relative paths, that go out of sync when the process does chdir(2). The chdir-notify API is introduced to let these codepaths adjust these cached paths to the new current directory. (merge fb9c2d2703 jk/relative-directory-fix later to maint).
"cd sub/dir && git commit ../path" ought to record the changes to the file "sub/path", but this regressed long time ago. (merge 86238e07ef bw/commit-partial-from-subdirectory-fix later to maint).
Recent introduction of "--log-destination" option to "git daemon" did not work well when the daemon was run under "--inetd" mode. (merge e67d906d73 lw/daemon-log-destination later to maint).
Small fix to the autoconf build procedure. (merge 249482daf0 es/fread-reads-dir-autoconf-fix later to maint).
Fix an unexploitable (because the oversized contents are not under attacker's control) buffer overflow. (merge d8579accfa bp/fsmonitor-bufsize-fix later to maint).
Recent simplification of build procedure forgot a bit of tweak to the build procedure of contrib/mw-to-git/ (merge d8698987f3 ab/simplify-perl-makefile later to maint).
Moving a submodule that itself has submodule in it with "git mv" forgot to make necessary adjustment to the nested sub-submodules; now the codepath learned to recurse into the submodules.
"git config --unset a.b", when "a.b" is the last variable in an otherwise empty section "a", left an empty section "a" behind, and worse yet, a subsequent "git config a.c value" did not reuse that empty shell and instead created a new one. These have been (partially) corrected. (merge c71d8bb38a js/empty-config-section-fix later to maint).
"git worktree remove" learned that "-f" is a shorthand for "--force" option, just like for "git worktree add". (merge d228eea514 sb/worktree-remove-opt-force later to maint).
The completion script (in contrib/) learned to clear cached list of command line options upon dot-sourcing it again in a more efficient way. (merge 94408dc71c sg/completion-clear-cached later to maint).
"git svn" had a minor thinko/typo which has been fixed. (merge 51db271587 ab/git-svn-get-record-typofix later to maint).
During a "rebase -i" session, the code could give older timestamp to commits created by later "pick" than an earlier "reword", which has been corrected. (merge 12f7babd6b js/ident-date-fix later to maint).
"git submodule status" did not check the symbolic revision name it computed for the submodule HEAD is not the NULL, and threw it at printf routines, which has been corrected. (merge 0b5e2ea7cf nd/submodule-status-fix later to maint).
When fed input that already has In-Reply-To: and/or References: headers and told to add the same information, "git send-email" added these headers separately, instead of appending to an existing one, which is a violation of the RFC. This has been corrected. (merge 256be1d3f0 sa/send-email-dedup-some-headers later to maint).
"git fast-export" had a regression in v2.15.0 era where it skipped some merge commits in certain cases, which has been corrected. (merge be011bbe00 ma/fast-export-skip-merge-fix later to maint).
The code did not propagate the terminal width to subprocesses via COLUMNS environment variable, which it now does. This caused trouble to "git column" helper subprocess when "git tag --column=row" tried to list the existing tags on a display with non-default width. (merge b5d5a567fb nd/term-columns later to maint).
We learned that our source files with ".pl" and ".py" extensions are Perl and Python files respectively and changes to them are better viewed as such with appropriate diff drivers. (merge 7818b619e2 ab/perl-python-attrs later to maint).
"git rebase -i" sometimes left intermediate "# This is a combination of N commits" message meant for the human consumption inside an editor in the final result in certain corner cases, which has been fixed. (merge 15ef69314d js/rebase-i-clean-msg-after-fixup-continue later to maint).
A test to see if the filesystem normalizes UTF-8 filename has been updated to check what we need to know in a more direct way, i.e. a path created in NFC form can be accessed with NFD form (or vice versa) to cope with APFS as well as HFS. (merge 742ae10e35 tb/test-apfs-utf8-normalization later to maint).
"git format-patch --cover --attach" created a broken MIME multipart message for the cover letter, which has been fixed by keeping the cover letter as plain text file. (merge 50cd54ef4e bc/format-patch-cover-no-attach later to maint).
The split-index feature had a long-standing and dormant bug in certain use of the in-core merge machinery, which has been fixed. (merge 7db118303a en/unpack-trees-split-index-fix later to maint).
Asciidoctor gives a reasonable imitation for AsciiDoc, but does not render illustration in a literal block correctly when indented with HT by default. The problem is fixed by forcing 8-space tabs. (merge 379805051d bc/asciidoctor-tab-width later to maint).
Code clean-up to adjust to a more recent lockfile API convention that allows lockfile instances kept on the stack. (merge 0fa5a2ed8d ma/lockfile-cleanup later to maint).
the_repository->index is not a allocated piece of memory but repo_clear() indiscriminately attempted to free(3) it, which has been corrected. (merge 74373b5f10 nd/repo-clear-keep-the-index later to maint).
Code clean-up to avoid non-standard-conformant pointer arithmetic. (merge c112084af9 rs/no-null-ptr-arith-in-fast-export later to maint).
Code clean-up to turn history traversal more robust in a semi-corrupt repository. (merge 8702b30fd7 jk/unavailable-can-be-missing later to maint).
"git update-ref A B" is supposed to ensure that ref A does not yet exist when B is a NULL OID, but this check was not done correctly for pseudo-refs outside refs/ hierarchy, e.g. MERGE_HEAD.
"git submodule update" and "git submodule add" supported the "--reference" option to borrow objects from a neighbouring local repository like "git clone" does, but lacked the more recent invention "--dissociate". Also "git submodule add" has been taught to take the "--progress" option. (merge a0ef29341a cf/submodule-progress-dissociate later to maint).
Update credential-netrc helper (in contrib/) to allow customizing the GPG used to decrypt the encrypted .netrc file. (merge 786ef50a23 lm/credential-netrc later to maint).
"git submodule update" attempts two different kinds of "git fetch" against the upstream repository to grab a commit bound at the submodule's path, but it incorrectly gave up if the first kind (i.e. a normal fetch) failed, making the second "last resort" one (i.e. fetching an exact commit object by object name) ineffective. This has been corrected. (merge e30d833671 sb/submodule-update-try-harder later to maint).
Error behaviour of "git grep" when it cannot read the index was inconsistent with other commands that uses the index, which has been corrected to error out early. (merge b2aa84c789 sb/grep-die-on-unreadable-index later to maint).
We used to call regfree() after regcomp() failed in some codepaths, which have been corrected. (merge 17154b1576 ma/regex-no-regfree-after-comp-fail later to maint).
The import-tars script (in contrib/) has been taught to handle tarballs with overly long paths that use PAX extended headers. (merge 12ecea46e3 pa/import-tars-long-names later to maint).
"git rev-parse Y..." etc. misbehaved when given endpoints were not committishes. (merge 0ed556d38f en/rev-parse-invalid-range later to maint).
"git pull --recurse-submodules --rebase", when the submodule repository's history did not have anything common between ours and the upstream's, failed to execute. We need to fetch from them to continue even in such a case. (merge 4d36f88be7 jt/submodule-pull-recurse-rebase later to maint).
"git remote update" can take both a single remote nickname and a nickname for remote groups, but only one of them was documented. (merge a97447a42a nd/remote-update-doc later to maint).
"index-pack --strict" has been taught to make sure that it runs the final object integrity checks after making the freshly indexed packfile available to itself. (merge 3737746120 jk/index-pack-maint later to maint).
Make zlib inflate codepath more robust against versions of zlib that clobber unused portion of outbuf. (merge b611396e97 jl/zlib-restore-nul-termination later to maint).
Fix old merge glitch in Documentation during v2.13-rc0 era. (merge 28cb06020b mw/doc-merge-enumfix later to maint).
The code to read compressed bitmap was not careful to avoid reading past the end of the file, which has been corrected. (merge 1140bf01ec jk/ewah-bounds-check later to maint).
"make NO_ICONV=NoThanks" did not override NEEDS_LIBICONV (i.e. linkage of -lintl, -liconv, etc. that are platform-specific tweaks), which has been corrected. (merge fdb1fbbc7d es/make-no-iconv later to maint).
Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.

New in Git 2.18 RC 0 (May 31, 2018)

UI, Workflows & Features:
Rename detection logic in "diff" family that is used in "merge" has learned to guess when all of x/a, x/b and x/c have moved to z/a, z/b and z/c, it is likely that x/d added in the meantime would also want to move to z/d by taking the hint that the entire directory 'x' moved to 'z'. A bug causing dirty files involved in a rename to be overwritten during merge has also been fixed as part of this work.
"git filter-branch" learned to use a different exit code to allow the callers to tell the case where there was no new commits to rewrite from other error cases.
When built with more recent cURL, GIT_SSL_VERSION can now specify "tlsv1.3" as its value.
"git gui" learned that "~/.ssh/id_ecdsa.pub" and "~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub" are also possible SSH key files. (merge 2e2f0288ef bb/git-gui-ssh-key-files later to maint).
"git gui" performs commit upon CTRL/CMD+ENTER but the CTRL/CMD+KP_ENTER (i.e. enter key on the numpad) did not have the same key binding. It now does. (merge 28a1d94a06 bp/git-gui-bind-kp-enter later to maint).
"git gui" has been taught to work with old versions of tk (like 8.5.7) that do not support "ttk::style theme use" as a way to query the current theme. (merge 4891961105 cb/git-gui-ttk-style later to maint).
"git rebase" has learned to honor "--signoff" option when using backends other than "am" (but not "--preserve-merges").
"git branch --list" during an interrupted "rebase -i" now lets users distinguish the case where a detached HEAD is being rebased and a normal branch is being rebased.
"git mergetools" learned talking to guiffy.
The scripts in contrib/emacs/ have outlived their usefulness and have been replaced with a stub that errors out and tells the user there are replacements.
The new "checkout-encoding" attribute can ask Git to convert the contents to the specified encoding when checking out to the working tree (and the other way around when checking in).
The "git config" command uses separate options e.g. "--int", "--bool", etc. to specify what type the caller wants the value to be interpreted as. A new "--type=" option has been introduced, which would make it cleaner to define new types.
"git config --get" learned the "--default" option, to help the calling script. Building on top of the above changes, the "git config" learns "--type=color" type. Taken together, you can do things like "git config --get foo.color --default blue" and get the ANSI color sequence for the color given to foo.color variable, or "blue" if the variable does not exist.
"git ls-remote" learned an option to allow sorting its output based on the refnames being shown.
The command line completion (in contrib/) has been taught that "git stash save" has been deprecated ("git stash push" is the preferred spelling in the new world) and does not offer it as a possible completion candidate when "git stash push" can be.
"git gc --prune=nonsense" spent long time repacking and then silently failed when underlying "git prune --expire=nonsense" failed to parse its command line. This has been corrected.
Error messages from "git push" can be painted for more visibility.
"git http-fetch" (deprecated) had an optional and experimental "feature" to fetch only commits and/or trees, which nobody used. This has been removed.
The functionality of "$GIT_DIR/info/grafts" has been superseded by the "refs/replace/" mechanism for some time now, but the internal code had support for it in many places, which has been cleaned up in order to drop support of the "grafts" mechanism.
"git worktree add" learned to check out an existing branch.
"git --no-pager cmd" did not have short-and-sweet single letter option. Now it does as "-P". (merge 7213c28818 js/no-pager-shorthand later to maint).
"git rebase" learned "--rebase-merges" to transplant the whole topology of commit graph elsewhere.
"git status" learned to pay attention to UI related diff configuration variables such as diff.renames.
The command line completion mechanism (in contrib/) learned to load custom completion file for "git $command" where $command is a custom "git-$command" that the end user has on the $PATH when using newer version of bash.
"git send-email" can sometimes offer confirmation dialog "Send this email?" with choices 'Yes', 'No', 'Quit', and 'All'. A new action 'Edit' has been added to this dialog's choice.
With merge.renames configuration set to false, the recursive merge strategy can be told not to spend cycles trying to find renamed paths and merge them accordingly.
"git status" learned to honor a new status.renames configuration to skip rename detection, which could be useful for those who want to do so without disabling the default rename detection done by the "git diff" command.
Command line completion (in contrib/) learned to complete pathnames for various commands better.
"git blame" learns to unhighlight uninteresting metadata from the originating commit on lines that are the same as the previous one, and also paint lines in different colors depending on the age of the commit.
Transfer protocol v2 learned to support the partial clone.
When a short hexadecimal string is used to name an object but there are multiple objects that share the string as the prefix of their names, the code lists these ambiguous candidates in a help message. These object names are now sorted according to their types for easier eyeballing.
"git fetch $there $refspec" that talks over protocol v2 can take advantage of server-side ref filtering; the code has been extended so that this mechanism triggers also when fetching with configured refspec.
Our HTTP client code used to advertise that we accept gzip encoding from the other side; instead, just let cURL library to advertise and negotiate the best one.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support, etc:
A "git fetch" from a repository with insane number of refs into a repository that is already up-to-date still wasted too many cycles making many lstat(2) calls to see if these objects at the tips exist as loose objects locally. These lstat(2) calls are optimized away by enumerating all loose objects beforehand. It is unknown if the new strategy negatively affects existing use cases, fetching into a repository with many loose objects from a repository with small number of refs.
Git can be built to use either v1 or v2 of the PCRE library, and so far, the build-time configuration USE_LIBPCRE=YesPlease instructed the build procedure to use v1, but now it means v2. USE_LIBPCRE1 and USE_LIBPCRE2 can be used to explicitly choose which version to use, as before.
The build procedure learned to optionally use symbolic links (instead of hardlinks and copies) to install "git-foo" for built-in commands, whose binaries are all identical.
Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
The way "git worktree prune" worked internally has been simplified, by assuming how "git worktree move" moves an existing worktree to a different place.
Code clean-up for the "repository" abstraction. (merge 00a3da2a13 nd/remove-ignore-env-field later to maint).
Code to find the length to uniquely abbreviate object names based on packfile content, which is a relatively recent addtion, has been optimized to use the same fan-out table.
The mechanism to use parse-options API to automate the command line completion continues to get extended and polished.
Copies of old scripted Porcelain commands in contrib/examples/ have been removed.
Some tests that rely on the exact hardcoded values of object names have been updated in preparation for hash function migration.
Perf-test update.
Test helper update.
The effort continues to refactor the internal global data structure to make it possible to open multiple repositories, work with and then close them,
Small test-helper programs have been consolidated into a single binary.
API clean-up around ref-filter code.
Shell completion (in contrib) that gives list of paths have been optimized somewhat.
The index file is updated to record the fsmonitor section after a full scan was made, to avoid wasting the effort that has already spent.
Performance measuring framework in t/perf learned to help bisecting performance regressions.
Some multi-word source filenames are being renamed to separate words with dashes instead of underscores.
An reusable "memory pool" implementation has been extracted from fast-import.c, which in turn has become the first user of the mem-pool API.
A build-time option has been added to allow Git to be told to refer to its associated files relative to the main binary, in the same way that has been possible on Windows for quite some time, for Linux, BSDs and Darwin.
Precompute and store information necessary for ancestry traversal in a separate file to optimize graph walking.
The effort to pass the repository in-core structure throughout the API continues. This round deals with the code that implements the refs/replace/ mechanism.
The build procedure "make DEVELOPER=YesPlease" learned to enable a bit more warning options depending on the compiler used to help developers more. There also is "make DEVOPTS=tokens" knob available now, for those who want to help fixing warnings we usually ignore, for example.
A new version of the transport protocol is being worked on.
The code to interface to GPG has been restructured somewhat to make it cleaner to integrate with other types of signature systems later.
The code has been taught to use the duplicated information stored in the commit-graph file to learn the tree object name for a commit to avoid opening and parsing the commit object when it makes sense to do so.
"git gc" in a large repository takes a lot of time as it considers to repack all objects into one pack by default. The command has been taught to pretend as if the largest existing packfile is marked with ".keep" so that it is left untouched while objects in other packs and loose ones are repacked.
The transport protocol v2 is getting updated further.
The codepath around object-info API has been taught to take the repository object (which in turn tells the API which object store the objects are to be located).
Rename detection logic in "diff" family that is used in "merge" has learned to guess when all of x/a, x/b and x/c have moved to z/a, z/b and z/c, it is likely that x/d added in the meantime would also want to move to z/d by taking the hint that the entire directory 'x' moved to 'z'. A bug causing dirty files involved in a rename to be overwritten during merge has also been fixed as part of this work. Incidentally, this also avoids updating a file in the working tree after a (non-trivial) merge whose result matches what our side originally had.
"git pack-objects" needs to allocate tons of "struct object_entry" while doing its work, and shrinking its size helps the performance quite a bit.
The implementation of "git rebase -i --root" has been updated to use the sequencer machinery more.
Developer support update, by using BUG() macro instead of die() to mark codepaths that should not happen more clearly.
Developer support. Use newer GCC on one of the builds done at TravisCI.org to get more warnings and errors diagnosed.
Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
By code restructuring of submodule merge in merge-recursive, informational messages from the codepath are now given using the same mechanism as other output, and honor the merge.verbosity configuration. The code also learned to give a few new messages when a submodule three-way merge resolves cleanly when one side records a descendant of the commit chosen by the other side.
Avoid unchecked snprintf() to make future code auditing easier. (merge ac4896f007 jk/snprintf-truncation later to maint).
Many tests hardcode the raw object names, which would change once we migrate away from SHA-1. While some of them must test against exact object names, most of them do not have to use hardcoded constants in the test. The latter kind of tests have been updated to test the moral equivalent of the original without hardcoding the actual object names.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes since v2.17:
"git shortlog cruft" aborted with a BUG message when run outside a Git repository. The command has been taught to complain about extra and unwanted arguments on its command line instead in such a case. (merge 4aa0161e83 ma/shortlog-revparse later to maint).
"git stash push -u -- " gave an unnecessary and confusing error message when there was no tracked files that match the , which has been fixed. (merge 353278687e tg/stash-untracked-with-pathspec-fix later to maint).
"git tag --contains no-such-commit" gave a full list of options after giving an error message. (merge 3bb0923f06 ps/contains-id-error-message later to maint).
"diff-highlight" filter (in contrib/) learned to undertand "git log --graph" output better. (merge 4551fbba14 jk/diff-highlight-graph-fix later to maint).
when refs that do not point at committish are given, "git filter-branch" gave a misleading error messages. This has been corrected. (merge f78ab355e7 yk/filter-branch-non-committish-refs later to maint).
"git submodule status" misbehaved on a submodule that has been removed from the working tree. (merge 74b6bda32f rs/status-with-removed-submodule later to maint).
When credential helper exits very quickly without reading its input, it used to cause Git to die with SIGPIPE, which has been fixed. (merge a0d51e8d0e eb/cred-helper-ignore-sigpipe later to maint).
"git rebase --keep-empty" still removed an empty commit if the other side contained an empty commit (due to the "does an equivalent patch exist already?" check), which has been corrected. (merge 3d946165e1 pw/rebase-keep-empty-fixes later to maint).
Some codepaths, including the refs API, get and keep relative paths, that go out of sync when the process does chdir(2). The chdir-notify API is introduced to let these codepaths adjust these cached paths to the new current directory. (merge fb9c2d2703 jk/relative-directory-fix later to maint).
"cd sub/dir && git commit ../path" ought to record the changes to the file "sub/path", but this regressed long time ago. (merge 86238e07ef bw/commit-partial-from-subdirectory-fix later to maint).
Recent introduction of "--log-destination" option to "git daemon" did not work well when the daemon was run under "--inetd" mode. (merge e67d906d73 lw/daemon-log-destination later to maint).
Small fix to the autoconf build procedure. (merge 249482daf0 es/fread-reads-dir-autoconf-fix later to maint).
Fix an unexploitable (because the oversized contents are not under attacker's control) buffer overflow. (merge d8579accfa bp/fsmonitor-bufsize-fix later to maint).
Recent simplification of build procedure forgot a bit of tweak to the build procedure of contrib/mw-to-git/ (merge d8698987f3 ab/simplify-perl-makefile later to maint).
Moving a submodule that itself has submodule in it with "git mv" forgot to make necessary adjustment to the nested sub-submodules; now the codepath learned to recurse into the submodules.
"git config --unset a.b", when "a.b" is the last variable in an otherwise empty section "a", left an empty section "a" behind, and worse yet, a subsequent "git config a.c value" did not reuse that empty shell and instead created a new one. These have been (partially) corrected. (merge c71d8bb38a js/empty-config-section-fix later to maint).
"git worktree remove" learned that "-f" is a shorthand for "--force" option, just like for "git worktree add". (merge d228eea514 sb/worktree-remove-opt-force later to maint).
The completion script (in contrib/) learned to clear cached list of command line options upon dot-sourcing it again in a more efficient way. (merge 94408dc71c sg/completion-clear-cached later to maint).
"git svn" had a minor thinko/typo which has been fixed. (merge 51db271587 ab/git-svn-get-record-typofix later to maint).
During a "rebase -i" session, the code could give older timestamp to commits created by later "pick" than an earlier "reword", which has been corrected. (merge 12f7babd6b js/ident-date-fix later to maint).
"git submodule status" did not check the symbolic revision name it computed for the submodule HEAD is not the NULL, and threw it at printf routines, which has been corrected. (merge 0b5e2ea7cf nd/submodule-status-fix later to maint).
When fed input that already has In-Reply-To: and/or References: headers and told to add the same information, "git send-email" added these headers separately, instead of appending to an existing one, which is a violation of the RFC. This has been corrected. (merge 256be1d3f0 sa/send-email-dedup-some-headers later to maint).
"git fast-export" had a regression in v2.15.0 era where it skipped some merge commits in certain cases, which has been corrected. (merge be011bbe00 ma/fast-export-skip-merge-fix later to maint).
The code did not propagate the terminal width to subprocesses via COLUMNS environment variable, which it now does. This caused trouble to "git column" helper subprocess when "git tag --column=row" tried to list the existing tags on a display with non-default width. (merge b5d5a567fb nd/term-columns later to maint).
We learned that our source files with ".pl" and ".py" extensions are Perl and Python files respectively and changes to them are better viewed as such with appropriate diff drivers. (merge 7818b619e2 ab/perl-python-attrs later to maint).
"git rebase -i" sometimes left intermediate "# This is a combination of N commits" message meant for the human consumption inside an editor in the final result in certain corner cases, which has been fixed. (merge 15ef69314d js/rebase-i-clean-msg-after-fixup-continue later to maint).
A test to see if the filesystem normalizes UTF-8 filename has been updated to check what we need to know in a more direct way, i.e. a path created in NFC form can be accessed with NFD form (or vice versa) to cope with APFS as well as HFS. (merge 742ae10e35 tb/test-apfs-utf8-normalization later to maint).
"git format-patch --cover --attach" created a broken MIME multipart message for the cover letter, which has been fixed by keeping the cover letter as plain text file. (merge 50cd54ef4e bc/format-patch-cover-no-attach later to maint).
The split-index feature had a long-standing and dormant bug in certain use of the in-core merge machinery, which has been fixed. (merge 7db118303a en/unpack-trees-split-index-fix later to maint).
Asciidoctor gives a reasonable imitation for AsciiDoc, but does not render illustration in a literal block correctly when indented with HT by default. The problem is fixed by forcing 8-space tabs. (merge 379805051d bc/asciidoctor-tab-width later to maint).
Code clean-up to adjust to a more recent lockfile API convention that allows lockfile instances kept on the stack. (merge 0fa5a2ed8d ma/lockfile-cleanup later to maint).
the_repository->index is not a allocated piece of memory but repo_clear() indiscriminately attempted to free(3) it, which has been corrected. (merge 74373b5f10 nd/repo-clear-keep-the-index later to maint).
Code clean-up to avoid non-standard-conformant pointer arithmetic. (merge c112084af9 rs/no-null-ptr-arith-in-fast-export later to maint).
Code clean-up to turn history traversal more robust in a semi-corrupt repository. (merge 8702b30fd7 jk/unavailable-can-be-missing later to maint).
"git update-ref A B" is supposed to ensure that ref A does not yet exist when B is a NULL OID, but this check was not done correctly for pseudo-refs outside refs/ hierarchy, e.g. MERGE_HEAD.
"git submodule update" and "git submodule add" supported the "--reference" option to borrow objects from a neighbouring local repository like "git clone" does, but lacked the more recent invention "--dissociate". Also "git submodule add" has been taught to take the "--progress" option. (merge a0ef29341a cf/submodule-progress-dissociate later to maint).
Update credential-netrc helper (in contrib/) to allow customizing the GPG used to decrypt the encrypted .netrc file. (merge 786ef50a23 lm/credential-netrc later to maint).
"git submodule update" attempts two different kinds of "git fetch" against the upstream repository to grab a commit bound at the submodule's path, but it incorrectly gave up if the first kind (i.e. a normal fetch) failed, making the second "last resort" one (i.e. fetching an exact commit object by object name) ineffective. This has been corrected. (merge e30d833671 sb/submodule-update-try-harder later to maint).
Error behaviour of "git grep" when it cannot read the index was inconsistent with other commands that uses the index, which has been corrected to error out early. (merge b2aa84c789 sb/grep-die-on-unreadable-index later to maint).
We used to call regfree() after regcomp() failed in some codepaths, which have been corrected. (merge 17154b1576 ma/regex-no-regfree-after-comp-fail later to maint).
Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.

New in Git 2.16.3 (Mar 23, 2018)

New in Git 2.16.2 (Feb 17, 2018)

New in Git 2.16.1 (Jan 22, 2018)

New in Git 2.16.0 (Jan 19, 2018)

UPDATES SINCE V2.15:
UI, Workflows & Features:
An empty string as a pathspec element that means "everything" i.e. 'git add ""', is now illegal. We started this by first deprecating and warning a pathspec that has such an element in 2.11 (Nov 2016).
A hook script that is set unexecutable is simply ignored. Git notifies when such a file is ignored, unless the message is squelched via advice.ignoredHook configuration.
"git pull" has been taught to accept "--[no-]signoff" option and pass it down to "git merge".
The "--push-option=" option to "git push" now defaults to a list of strings configured via push.pushOption variable.
"gitweb" checks if a directory is searchable with Perl's "-x" operator, which can be enhanced by using "filetest 'access'" pragma, which now we do.
"git stash save" has been deprecated in favour of "git stash push".
The set of paths output from "git status --ignored" was tied closely with its "--untracked=" option, but now it can be controlled more flexibly. Most notably, a directory that is ignored because it is listed to be ignored in the ignore/exclude mechanism can be handled differently from a directory that ends up to be ignored only because all files in it are ignored.
The remote-helper for talking to MediaWiki has been updated to truncate an overlong pagename so that ".mw" suffix can still be added.
The remote-helper for talking to MediaWiki has been updated to work with mediawiki namespaces.
The "--format=..." option "git for-each-ref" takes learned to show the name of the 'remote' repository and the ref at the remote side that is affected for 'upstream' and 'push' via "%(push:remotename)" and friends.
Doc and message updates to teach users "bisect view" is a synonym for "bisect visualize".
"git bisect run" that did not specify any command to run used to go ahead and treated all commits to be tested as 'good'. This has been corrected by making the command error out.
The SubmittingPatches document has been converted to produce an HTML version via AsciiDoc/Asciidoctor.
We learned to optionally talk to a file system monitor via new fsmonitor extension to speed up "git status" and other operations that need to see which paths have been modified. Currently we only support "watchman". See File System Monitor section of git-update-index(1) for more detail.
The "diff" family of commands learned to ignore differences in carriage return at the end of line.
Places that know about "sendemail.to", like documentation and shell completion (in contrib/) have been taught about "sendemail.tocmd", too.
"git add --renormalize ." is a new and safer way to record the fact that you are correcting the end-of-line convention and other "convert_to_git()" glitches in the in-repository data.
"git branch" and "git checkout -b" are now forbidden from creating a branch whose name is "HEAD".
"git branch --list" learned to show its output through the pager by default when the output is going to a terminal, which is controlled by the pager.branch configuration variable. This is similar to a recent change to "git tag --list".
"git grep -W", "git diff -W" and their friends learned a heuristic to extend a pre-context beyond the line that matches the "function pattern" (aka "diff.*.xfuncname") to include a comment block, if exists, that immediately precedes it.
"git config --expiry-date gc.reflogexpire" can read "2.weeks" from the configuration and report it as a timestamp, just like "--int" would read "1k" and report 1024, to help consumption by scripts.
The shell completion (in contrib/) learned that "git pull" can take the "--autostash" option.
The tagnames "git log --decorate" uses to annotate the commits can now be limited to subset of available refs with the two additional options, --decorate-refs[-exclude]=.
"git grep" compiled with libpcre2 sometimes triggered a segfault, which is being fixed.
"git send-email" tries to see if the sendmail program is available in /usr/lib and /usr/sbin; extend the list of locations to be checked to also include directories on $PATH.
"git diff" learned, "--anchored", a variant of the "--patience" algorithm, to which the user can specify which 'unique' line to be used as anchoring points.
The way "git worktree add" determines what branch to create from where and checkout in the new worktree has been updated a bit.
Ancient part of codebase still shows dots after an abbreviated object name just to show that it is not a full object name, but these ellipses are confusing to people who newly discovered Git who are used to seeing abbreviated object names and find them confusing with the range syntax.
With a configuration variable rebase.abbreviateCommands set, "git rebase -i" produces the todo list with a single-letter command names.
"git worktree add" learned to run the post-checkout hook, just like "git checkout" does, after the initial checkout.
"git svn" has been updated to strip CRs in the commit messages, as recent versions of Subversion rejects them.
"git imap-send" did not correctly quote the folder name when making a request to the server, which has been corrected.
Error messages from "git rebase" have been somewhat cleaned up.
Git has been taught to support an https:// URL used for http.proxy when using recent versions of libcurl.
"git merge" learned to pay attention to merge.verifySignatures configuration variable and pretend as if '--verify-signatures' option was given from the command line.
"git describe" was taught to dig trees deeper to find a : that refers to a given blob object.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.:
An earlier update made it possible to use an on-stack in-core lockfile structure (as opposed to having to deliberately leak an on-heap one). Many codepaths have been updated to take advantage of this new facility.
Calling cmd_foo() as if it is a general purpose helper function is a no-no. Correct two instances of such to set an example.
We try to see if somebody runs our test suite with a shell that does not support "local" like bash/dash does.
An early part of piece-by-piece rewrite of "git bisect" in C.
GSoC to piece-by-piece rewrite "git submodule" in C.
Optimize the code to find shortest unique prefix of object names.
Pathspec-limited revision traversal was taught not to keep finding unneeded differences once it knows two trees are different inside given pathspec.
Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
Code cleanup.
A single-word "unsigned flags" in the diff options is being split into a structure with many bitfields.
TravisCI build updates.
Parts of a test to drive the long-running content filter interface has been split into its own module, hopefully to eventually become reusable.
Drop (perhaps overly cautious) sanity check before using the index read from the filesystem at runtime.
The build procedure has been taught to avoid some unnecessary instability in the build products.
A new mechanism to upgrade the wire protocol in place is proposed and demonstrated that it works with the older versions of Git without harming them.
An infrastructure to define what hash function is used in Git is introduced, and an effort to plumb that throughout various codepaths has been started.
The code to iterate over loose object files got optimized.
An internal function that was left for backward compatibility has been removed, as there is no remaining callers.
Historically, the diff machinery for rename detection had a hardcoded limit of 32k paths; this is being lifted to allow users trade cycles with a (possibly) easier to read result.
The tracing infrastructure has been optimized for cases where no tracing is requested.
In preparation for implementing narrow/partial clone, the object walking machinery has been taught a way to tell it to "filter" some objects from enumeration.
A few structures and variables that are implementation details of the decorate API have been renamed and then the API got documented better.
Assorted updates for TravisCI integration. (merge 4f26366679 sg/travis-fixes later to maint).
Introduce a helper to simplify code to parse a common pattern that expects either "--key" or "--key=".
"git version --build-options" learned to report the host CPU and the exact commit object name the binary was built from.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.15
"auto" as a value for the columnar output configuration ought to judge "is the output consumed by humans?" with the same criteria as "auto" for coloured output configuration, i.e. either the standard output stream is going to tty, or a pager is in use. We forgot the latter, which has been fixed.
The experimental "color moved lines differently in diff output" feature was buggy around "ignore whitespace changes" edges, which has been corrected.
Instead of using custom line comparison and hashing functions to implement "moved lines" coloring in the diff output, use the pair of these functions from lower-layer xdiff/ code.
Some codepaths did not check for errors when asking what branch the HEAD points at, which have been fixed.
"git commit", after making a commit, did not check for errors when asking on what branch it made the commit, which has been corrected.
"git status --ignored -u" did not stop at a working tree of a separate project that is embedded in an ignored directory and listed files in that other project, instead of just showing the directory itself as ignored.
A broken access to object databases in recent update to "git grep --recurse-submodules" has been fixed.
A recent regression in "git rebase -i" that broke execution of git commands from subdirectories via "exec" instruction has been fixed.
A (possibly flakey) test fix.
"git check-ref-format --branch @{-1}" bit a "BUG()" when run outside a repository for obvious reasons; clarify the documentation and make sure we do not even try to expand the at-mark magic in such a case, but still call the validation logic for branch names.
"git fetch --recurse-submodules" now knows that submodules can be moved around in the superproject in addition to getting updated, and finds the ones that need to be fetched accordingly.
Command line completion (in contrib/) update.
Description of blame.{showroot,blankboundary,showemail,date} configuration variables have been added to "git config --help".
After an error from lstat(), diff_populate_filespec() function sometimes still went ahead and used invalid data in struct stat, which has been fixed.
UNC paths are also relevant in Cygwin builds and they are now tested just like Mingw builds.
Correct start-up sequence so that a repository could be placed immediately under the root directory again (which was broken at around Git 2.13).
The credential helper for libsecret (in contrib/) has been improved to allow possibly prompting the end user to unlock secrets that are currently locked (otherwise the secrets may not be loaded).
MinGW updates.
Error checking in "git imap-send" for empty response has been improved.
Recent update to the refs infrastructure implementation started rewriting packed-refs file more often than before; this has been optimized again for most trivial cases.
Some error messages did not quote filenames shown in it, which have been fixed.
"git rebase -i" recently started misbehaving when a submodule that is configured with 'submodule..ignore' is dirty; this has been corrected.
Building with NO_LIBPCRE1_JIT did not disable it, which has been fixed.
We used to add an empty alternate object database to the system that does not help anything; it has been corrected.
Doc update around use of "format-patch --subject-prefix" etc.
A fix for an ancient bug in "git apply --ignore-space-change" codepath.
Clarify and enhance documentation for "merge-base --fork-point", as it was clear what it computed but not why/what for.
A few scripts (both in production and tests) incorrectly redirected their error output. These have been corrected.
"git notes" sent its error message to its standard output stream, which was corrected.
The three-way merge performed by "git cherry-pick" was confused when a new submodule was added in the meantime, which has been fixed (or "papered over").
The sequencer machinery (used by "git cherry-pick A..B", and "git rebase -i", among other things) would have lost a commit if stopped due to an unlockable index file, which has been fixed.
"git apply --inaccurate-eof" when used with "--ignore-space-change" triggered an internal sanity check, which has been fixed.
Command line completion (in contrib/) has been taught about the "--copy" option of "git branch".
When "git rebase" prepared a mailbox of changes and fed it to "git am" to replay them, it was confused when a stray "From " happened to be in the log message of one of the replayed changes. This has been corrected.
There was a recent semantic mismerge in the codepath to write out a section of a configuration section, which has been corrected.
Mentions of "git-rebase" and "git-am" (dashed form) still remained in end-user visible strings emitted by the "git rebase" command; they have been corrected.
Contrary to the documentation, "git pull -4/-6 other-args" did not ask the underlying "git fetch" to go over IPv4/IPv6, which has been corrected.
"git checkout --recursive" may overwrite and rewind the history of the branch that happens to be checked out in submodule repositories, which might not be desirable. Detach the HEAD but still allow the recursive checkout to succeed in such a case. (merge 57f22bf997 sb/submodule-recursive-checkout-detach-head later to maint).
"git branch --set-upstream" has been deprecated and (sort of) removed, as "--set-upstream-to" is the preferred one these days. The documentation still had "--set-upstream" listed on its synopsis section, which has been corrected. (merge a060f3d3d8 tz/branch-doc-remove-set-upstream later to maint).
Internally we use 0{40} as a placeholder object name to signal the codepath that there is no such object (e.g. the fast-forward check while "git fetch" stores a new remote-tracking ref says "we know there is no 'old' thing pointed at by the ref, as we are creating it anew" by passing 0{40} for the 'old' side), and expect that a codepath to locate an in-core object to return NULL as a sign that the object does not exist. A look-up for an object that does not exist however is quite costly with a repository with large number of packfiles. This access pattern has been optimized. (merge 87b5e236a1 jk/fewer-pack-rescan later to maint).
In addition to "git stash -m message", the command learned to accept "git stash -mmessage" form. (merge 5675473fcb ph/stash-save-m-option-fix later to maint).
@{-N} in "git checkout @{-N}" may refer to a detached HEAD state, but the documentation was not clear about it, which has been fixed. (merge 75ce149575 ks/doc-checkout-previous later to maint).
A regression in the progress eye-candy was fixed. (merge 9c5951cacf jk/progress-delay-fix later to maint).
The code internal to the recursive merge strategy was not fully prepared to see a path that is renamed to try overwriting another path that is only different in case on case insensitive systems. This does not matter in the current code, but will start to matter once the rename detection logic starts taking hints from nearby paths moving to some directory and moves a new path along with them. (merge 4cba2b0108 en/merge-recursive-icase-removal later to maint).
An v2.12-era regression in pathspec match logic, which made it look into submodule tree even when it is not desired, has been fixed. (merge eef3df5a93 bw/pathspec-match-submodule-boundary later to maint).
Amending commits in git-gui broke the author name that is non-ascii due to incorrect enconding conversion.
Recent update to the submodule configuration code broke "diff-tree" by accidentally stopping to read from the index upfront. (merge fd66bcc31f bw/submodule-config-cleanup later to maint).
Git shows a message to tell the user that it is waiting for the user to finish editing when spawning an editor, in case the editor opens to a hidden window or somewhere obscure and the user gets lost. (merge abfb04d0c7 ls/editor-waiting-message later to maint).
The "safe crlf" check incorrectly triggered for contents that does not use CRLF as line endings, which has been corrected. (merge 649f1f0948 tb/check-crlf-for-safe-crlf later to maint).
"git clone --shared" to borrow from a (secondary) worktree did not work, even though "git clone --local" did. Both are now accepted. (merge b3b05971c1 es/clone-shared-worktree later to maint).
The build procedure now allows not just the repositories but also the refs to be used to take pre-formatted manpages and html documents to install. (merge 65289e9dcd rb/quick-install-doc later to maint).
Update the shell prompt script (in contrib/) to strip trailing CR from strings read from various "state" files. (merge 041fe8fc83 ra/prompt-eread-fix later to maint).
"git merge -s recursive" did not correctly abort when the index is dirty, if the merged tree happened to be the same as the current HEAD, which has been fixed.
Bytes with high-bit set were encoded incorrectly and made credential helper fail. (merge 4c267f2ae3 jd/fix-strbuf-add-urlencode-bytes later to maint).
"git rebase -p -X" did not propagate the option properly down to underlying merge strategy backend. (merge dd6fb0053c js/fix-merge-arg-quoting-in-rebase-p later to maint).
"git merge -s recursive" did not correctly abort when the index is dirty, if the merged tree happened to be the same as the current HEAD, which has been fixed. (merge f309e8e768 ew/empty-merge-with-dirty-index-maint later to maint).
Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.

New in Git 2.16.0 RC 0 (Dec 29, 2017)

UPDATES SINCE V2.15:
UI, Workflows & Features:
An empty string as a pathspec element that means "everything" i.e. 'git add ""', is now illegal. We started this by first deprecating and warning a pathspec that has such an element in 2.11 (Nov 2016).
A hook script that is set unexecutable is simply ignored. Git notifies when such a file is ignored, unless the message is squelched via advice.ignoredHook configuration.
"git pull" has been taught to accept "--[no-]signoff" option and pass it down to "git merge".
The "--push-option=" option to "git push" now defaults to a list of strings configured via push.pushOption variable.
"gitweb" checks if a directory is searchable with Perl's "-x" operator, which can be enhanced by using "filetest 'access'" pragma, which now we do.
"git stash save" has been deprecated in favour of "git stash push".
The set of paths output from "git status --ignored" was tied closely with its "--untracked=" option, but now it can be controlled more flexibly. Most notably, a directory that is ignored because it is listed to be ignored in the ignore/exclude mechanism can be handled differently from a directory that ends up to be ignored only because all files in it are ignored.
The remote-helper for talking to MediaWiki has been updated to truncate an overlong pagename so that ".mw" suffix can still be added.
The remote-helper for talking to MediaWiki has been updated to work with mediawiki namespaces.
The "--format=..." option "git for-each-ref" takes learned to show the name of the 'remote' repository and the ref at the remote side that is affected for 'upstream' and 'push' via "%(push:remotename)" and friends.
Doc and message updates to teach users "bisect view" is a synonym for "bisect visualize".
"git bisect run" that did not specify any command to run used to go ahead and treated all commits to be tested as 'good'. This has been corrected by making the command error out.
The SubmittingPatches document has been converted to produce an HTML version via AsciiDoc/Asciidoctor.
We learned to talk to watchman to speed up "git status" and other operations that need to see which paths have been modified.
The "diff" family of commands learned to ignore differences in carriage return at the end of line.
Places that know about "sendemail.to", like documentation and shell completion (in contrib/) have been taught about "sendemail.tocmd", too.
"git add --renormalize ." is a new and safer way to record the fact that you are correcting the end-of-line convention and other "convert_to_git()" glitches in the in-repository data.
"git branch" and "git checkout -b" are now forbidden from creating a branch whose name is "HEAD".
"git branch --list" learned to show its output through the pager by default when the output is going to a terminal, which is controlled by the pager.branch configuration variable. This is similar to a recent change to "git tag --list".
"git grep -W", "git diff -W" and their friends learned a heuristic to extend a pre-context beyond the line that matches the "function pattern" (aka "diff.*.xfuncname") to include a comment block, if exists, that immediately precedes it.
"git config --expiry-date gc.reflogexpire" can read "2.weeks" from the configuration and report it as a timestamp, just like "--int" would read "1k" and report 1024, to help consumption by scripts.
The shell completion (in contrib/) learned that "git pull" can take the "--autostash" option.
The tagnames "git log --decorate" uses to annotate the commits can now be limited to subset of available refs with the two additional options, --decorate-refs[-exclude]=.
"git grep" compiled with libpcre2 sometimes triggered a segfault, which is being fixed.
"git send-email" tries to see if the sendmail program is available in /usr/lib and /usr/sbin; extend the list of locations to be checked to also include directories on $PATH.
"git diff" learned, "--anchored", a variant of the "--patience" algorithm, to which the user can specify which 'unique' line to be used as anchoring points.
The way "git worktree add" determines what branch to create from where and checkout in the new worktree has been updated a bit.
Ancient part of codebase still shows dots after an abbreviated object name just to show that it is not a full object name, but these ellipses are confusing to people who newly discovered Git who are used to seeing abbreviated object names and find them confusing with the range syntax.
With a configuration variable rebase.abbreviateCommands set, "git rebase -i" produces the todo list with a single-letter command names.
"git worktree add" learned to run the post-checkout hook, just like "git checkout" does, after the initial checkout.
"git svn" has been updated to strip CRs in the commit messages, as recent versions of Subversion rejects them.
"git imap-send" did not correctly quote the folder name when making a request to the server, which has been corrected.
Error messages from "git rebase" have been somewhat cleaned up.
Git has been taught to support an https:// URL used for http.proxy when using recent versions of libcurl.
"git merge" learned to pay attention to merge.verifySignatures configuration variable and pretend as if '--verify-signatures' option was given from the command line.
"git describe" was taught to dig trees deeper to find a : that refers to a given blob object.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.:
An earlier update made it possible to use an on-stack in-core lockfile structure (as opposed to having to deliberately leak an on-heap one). Many codepaths have been updated to take advantage of this new facility.
Calling cmd_foo() as if it is a general purpose helper function is a no-no. Correct two instances of such to set an example.
We try to see if somebody runs our test suite with a shell that does not support "local" like bash/dash does.
An early part of piece-by-piece rewrite of "git bisect" in C.
GSoC to piece-by-piece rewrite "git submodule" in C.
Optimize the code to find shortest unique prefix of object names.
Pathspec-limited revision traversal was taught not to keep finding unneeded differences once it knows two trees are different inside given pathspec.
Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
Code cleanup.
A single-word "unsigned flags" in the diff options is being split into a structure with many bitfields.
TravisCI build updates.
Parts of a test to drive the long-running content filter interface has been split into its own module, hopefully to eventually become reusable.
Drop (perhaps overly cautious) sanity check before using the index read from the filesystem at runtime.
The build procedure has been taught to avoid some unnecessary instability in the build products.
A new mechanism to upgrade the wire protocol in place is proposed and demonstrated that it works with the older versions of Git without harming them.
An infrastructure to define what hash function is used in Git is introduced, and an effort to plumb that throughout various codepaths has been started.
The code to iterate over loose object files got optimized.
An internal function that was left for backward compatibility has been removed, as there is no remaining callers.
Historically, the diff machinery for rename detection had a hardcoded limit of 32k paths; this is being lifted to allow users trade cycles with a (possibly) easier to read result.
The tracing infrastructure has been optimized for cases where no tracing is requested.
In preparation for implementing narrow/partial clone, the object walking machinery has been taught a way to tell it to "filter" some objects from enumeration.
A few structures and variables that are implementation details of the decorate API have been renamed and then the API got documented better.
Assorted updates for TravisCI integration. (merge 4f26366679 sg/travis-fixes later to maint).
Introduce a helper to simplify code to parse a common pattern that expects either "--key" or "--key=".
"git version --build-options" learned to report the host CPU and the exact commit object name the binary was built from.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.15:
"auto" as a value for the columnar output configuration ought to judge "is the output consumed by humans?" with the same criteria as "auto" for coloured output configuration, i.e. either the standard output stream is going to tty, or a pager is in use. We forgot the latter, which has been fixed.
The experimental "color moved lines differently in diff output" feature was buggy around "ignore whitespace changes" edges, which has been corrected.
Instead of using custom line comparison and hashing functions to implement "moved lines" coloring in the diff output, use the pair of these functions from lower-layer xdiff/ code.
Some codepaths did not check for errors when asking what branch the HEAD points at, which have been fixed.
"git commit", after making a commit, did not check for errors when asking on what branch it made the commit, which has been corrected.
"git status --ignored -u" did not stop at a working tree of a separate project that is embedded in an ignored directory and listed files in that other project, instead of just showing the directory itself as ignored.
A broken access to object databases in recent update to "git grep --recurse-submodules" has been fixed.
A recent regression in "git rebase -i" that broke execution of git commands from subdirectories via "exec" instruction has been fixed.
A (possibly flakey) test fix.
"git check-ref-format --branch @{-1}" bit a "BUG()" when run outside a repository for obvious reasons; clarify the documentation and make sure we do not even try to expand the at-mark magic in such a case, but still call the validation logic for branch names.
"git fetch --recurse-submodules" now knows that submodules can be moved around in the superproject in addition to getting updated, and finds the ones that need to be fetched accordingly.
Command line completion (in contrib/) update.
Description of blame.{showroot,blankboundary,showemail,date} configuration variables have been added to "git config --help".
After an error from lstat(), diff_populate_filespec() function sometimes still went ahead and used invalid data in struct stat, which has been fixed.
UNC paths are also relevant in Cygwin builds and they are now tested just like Mingw builds.
Correct start-up sequence so that a repository could be placed immediately under the root directory again (which was broken at around Git 2.13).
The credential helper for libsecret (in contrib/) has been improved to allow possibly prompting the end user to unlock secrets that are currently locked (otherwise the secrets may not be loaded).
MinGW updates.
Error checking in "git imap-send" for empty response has been improved.
Recent update to the refs infrastructure implementation started rewriting packed-refs file more often than before; this has been optimized again for most trivial cases.
Some error messages did not quote filenames shown in it, which have been fixed.
"git rebase -i" recently started misbehaving when a submodule that is configured with 'submodule..ignore' is dirty; this has been corrected.
Building with NO_LIBPCRE1_JIT did not disable it, which has been fixed.
We used to add an empty alternate object database to the system that does not help anything; it has been corrected.
Doc update around use of "format-patch --subject-prefix" etc.
A fix for an ancient bug in "git apply --ignore-space-change" codepath.
Clarify and enhance documentation for "merge-base --fork-point", as it was clear what it computed but not why/what for.
A few scripts (both in production and tests) incorrectly redirected their error output. These have been corrected.
"git notes" sent its error message to its standard output stream, which was corrected.
The three-way merge performed by "git cherry-pick" was confused when a new submodule was added in the meantime, which has been fixed (or "papered over").
The sequencer machinery (used by "git cherry-pick A..B", and "git rebase -i", among other things) would have lost a commit if stopped due to an unlockable index file, which has been fixed.
"git apply --inaccurate-eof" when used with "--ignore-space-change" triggered an internal sanity check, which has been fixed.
Command line completion (in contrib/) has been taught about the "--copy" option of "git branch".
When "git rebase" prepared an mailbox of changes and fed it to "git am" to replay them, it was confused when a stray "From " happened to be in the log message of one of the replayed changes. This has been corrected.
There was a recent semantic mismerge in the codepath to write out a section of a configuration section, which has been corrected.
Mentions of "git-rebase" and "git-am" (dashed form) still remained in end-user visible strings emitted by the "git rebase" command; they have been corrected.
Contrary to the documentation, "git pull -4/-6 other-args" did not ask the underlying "git fetch" to go over IPv4/IPv6, which has been corrected.
"git checkout --recursive" may overwrite and rewind the history of the branch that happens to be checked out in submodule repositories, which might not be desirable. Detach the HEAD but still allow the recursive checkout to succeed in such a case. (merge 57f22bf997 sb/submodule-recursive-checkout-detach-head later to maint).
"git branch --set-upstream" has been deprecated and (sort of) removed, as "--set-upstream-to" is the preferred one these days. The documentation still had "--set-upstream" listed on its synopsis section, which has been corrected. (merge a060f3d3d8 tz/branch-doc-remove-set-upstream later to maint).
Internally we use 0{40} as a placeholder object name to signal the codepath that there is no such object (e.g. the fast-forward check while "git fetch" stores a new remote-tracking ref says "we know there is no 'old' thing pointed at by the ref, as we are creating it anew" by passing 0{40} for the 'old' side), and expect that a codepath to locate an in-core object to return NULL as a sign that the object does not exist. A look-up for an object that does not exist however is quite costly with a repository with large number of packfiles. This access pattern has been optimized. (merge 87b5e236a1 jk/fewer-pack-rescan later to maint).
In addition to "git stash -m message", the command learned to accept "git stash -mmessage" form. (merge 5675473fcb ph/stash-save-m-option-fix later to maint).
@{-N} in "git checkout @{-N}" may refer to a detached HEAD state, but the documentation was not clear about it, which has been fixed. (merge 75ce149575 ks/doc-checkout-previous later to maint).
A regression in the progress eye-candy was fixed. (merge 9c5951cacf jk/progress-delay-fix later to maint).
The code internal to the recursive merge strategy was not fully prepared to see a path that is renamed to try overwriting another path that is only different in case on case insensitive systems. This does not matter in the current code, but will start to matter once the rename detection logic starts taking hints from nearby paths moving to some directory and moves a new path along with them. (merge 4cba2b0108 en/merge-recursive-icase-removal later to maint).
An v2.12-era regression in pathspec match logic, which made it look into submodule tree even when it is not desired, has been fixed. (merge eef3df5a93 bw/pathspec-match-submodule-boundary later to maint).
Amending commits in git-gui broke the author name that is non-ascii due to incorrect enconding conversion.
Recent update to the submodule configuration code broke "diff-tree" by accidentally stopping to read from the index upfront. (merge fd66bcc31f bw/submodule-config-cleanup later to maint).
Git shows a message to tell the user that it is waiting for the user to finish editing when spawning an editor, in case the editor opens to a hidden window or somewhere obscure and the user gets lost. (merge abfb04d0c7 ls/editor-waiting-message later to maint).
The "safe crlf" check incorrectly triggered for contents that does not use CRLF as line endings, which has been corrected. (merge 649f1f0948 tb/check-crlf-for-safe-crlf later to maint).
"git clone --shared" to borrow from a (secondary) worktree did not work, even though "git clone --local" did. Both are now accepted. (merge b3b05971c1 es/clone-shared-worktree later to maint).
The build procedure now allows not just the repositories but also the refs to be used to take pre-formatted manpages and html documents to install. (merge 65289e9dcd rb/quick-install-doc later to maint).
Update the shell prompt script (in contrib/) to strip trailing CR from strings read from various "state" files. (merge 041fe8fc83 ra/prompt-eread-fix later to maint).
Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.

New in Git 2.15.1 (Nov 29, 2017)

Fixes since v2.15:
TravisCI build updates.
"auto" as a value for the columnar output configuration ought to judge "is the output consumed by humans?" with the same criteria as "auto" for coloured output configuration, i.e. either the standard output stream is going to tty, or a pager is in use. We forgot the latter, which has been fixed.
The experimental "color moved lines differently in diff output" feature was buggy around "ignore whitespace changes" edges, which has been corrected.
Instead of using custom line comparison and hashing functions to implement "moved lines" coloring in the diff output, use the pair of these functions from lower-layer xdiff/ code.
Some codepaths did not check for errors when asking what branch the HEAD points at, which have been fixed.
"git commit", after making a commit, did not check for errors when asking on what branch it made the commit, which has been corrected.
"git status --ignored -u" did not stop at a working tree of a separate project that is embedded in an ignored directory and listed files in that other project, instead of just showing the directory itself as ignored.
A broken access to object databases in recent update to "git grep --recurse-submodules" has been fixed.
A recent regression in "git rebase -i" that broke execution of git commands from subdirectories via "exec" instruction has been fixed.
"git check-ref-format --branch @{-1}" bit a "BUG()" when run outside a repository for obvious reasons; clarify the documentation and make sure we do not even try to expand the at-mark magic in such a case, but still call the validation logic for branch names.
Command line completion (in contrib/) update.
Description of blame.{showroot,blankboundary,showemail,date} configuration variables have been added to "git config --help".
After an error from lstat(), diff_populate_filespec() function sometimes still went ahead and used invalid data in struct stat, which has been fixed.
UNC paths are also relevant in Cygwin builds and they are now tested just like Mingw builds.
Correct start-up sequence so that a repository could be placed immediately under the root directory again (which was broken at around Git 2.13).
The credential helper for libsecret (in contrib/) has been improved to allow possibly prompting the end user to unlock secrets that are currently locked (otherwise the secrets may not be loaded).
Updates from GfW project.
"git rebase -i" recently started misbehaving when a submodule that is configured with 'submodule..ignore' is dirty; this has been corrected.
Some error messages did not quote filenames shown in it, which have been fixed.
Building with NO_LIBPCRE1_JIT did not disable it, which has been fixed.
We used to add an empty alternate object database to the system that does not help anything; it has been corrected.
Error checking in "git imap-send" for empty response has been improved.
An ancient bug in "git apply --ignore-space-change" codepath has been fixed.
There was a recent semantic mismerge in the codepath to write out a section of a configuration section, which has been corrected.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.15.0 (Oct 30, 2017)

UI, WORKFLOWS & FEATURES:
An example that is now obsolete has been removed from a sample hook, and an old example in it that added a sign-off manually has been improved to use the interpret-trailers command.
The advice message given when "git rebase" stops for conflicting changes has been improved.
The "rerere-train" script (in contrib/) learned the "--overwrite" option to allow overwriting existing recorded resolutions.
"git contacts" (in contrib/) now lists the address on the "Reported-by:" trailer to its output, in addition to those on S-o-b: and other trailers, to make it easier to notify (and thank) the original bug reporter.
"git rebase", especially when it is run by mistake and ends up trying to replay many changes, spent long time in silence. The command has been taught to show progress report when it spends long time preparing these many changes to replay (which would give the user a chance to abort with ^C).
"git merge" learned a "--signoff" option to add the Signed-off-by: trailer with the committer's name.
"git diff" learned to optionally paint new lines that are the same as deleted lines elsewhere differently from genuinely new lines.
"git interpret-trailers" learned to take the trailer specifications from the command line that overrides the configured values.
"git interpret-trailers" has been taught a "--parse" and a few other options to make it easier for scripts to grab existing trailer lines from a commit log message.
The "--format=%(trailers)" option "git log" and its friends take learned to take the 'unfold' and 'only' modifiers to normalize its output, e.g. "git log --format=%(trailers:only,unfold)".
"gitweb" shows a link to visit the 'raw' contents of blbos in the history overview page.
"[gc] rerereResolved = 5.days" used to be invalid, as the variable is defined to take an integer counting the number of days. It now is allowed.
The code to acquire a lock on a reference (e.g. while accepting a push from a client) used to immediately fail when the reference is already locked---now it waits for a very short while and retries, which can make it succeed if the lock holder was holding it during a read-only operation.
"branch --set-upstream" that has been deprecated in Git 1.8 has finally been retired.
The codepath to call external process filter for smudge/clean operation learned to show the progress meter.
"git rev-parse" learned "--is-shallow-repository", that is to be used in a way similar to existing "--is-bare-repository" and friends.
"git describe --match " has been taught to play well with the "--all" option.
"git branch" learned "-c/-C" to create a new branch by copying an existing one.
Some commands (most notably "git status") makes an opportunistic update when performing a read-only operation to help optimize later operations in the same repository. The new "--no-optional-locks" option can be passed to Git to disable them.
"git for-each-ref --format=..." learned a new format element, %(trailers), to show only the commit log trailer part of the log message.
PERFORMANCE, INTERNAL IMPLEMENTATION, DEVELOPMENT SUPPORT ETC:
Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
Start using selected c99 constructs in small, stable and essentialpart of the system to catch people who care about older compilers that do not grok them.
The filter-process interface learned to allow a process with long latency give a "delayed" response.
Many uses of comparision callback function the hashmap API uses cast the callback function type when registering it to hashmap_init(), which defeats the compile time type checking when the callback interface changes (e.g. gaining more parameters). The callback implementations have been updated to take "void *" pointers and cast them to the type they expect instead.
Because recent Git for Windows do come with a real msgfmt, the build procedure for git-gui has been updated to use it instead of a hand-rolled substitute.
"git grep --recurse-submodules" has been reworked to give a more consistent output across submodule boundary (and do its thing without having to fork a separate process).
A helper function to read a single whole line into strbuf mistakenly triggered OOM error at EOF under certain conditions, which has been fixed.
The "ref-store" code reorganization continues.
"git commit" used to discard the index and re-read from the filesystem just in case the pre-commit hook has updated it in the middle; this has been optimized out when we know we do not run the pre-commit hook. (merge 680ee550d7 kw/commit-keep-index-when-pre-commit-is-not-run later to maint).
Updates to the HTTP layer we made recently unconditionally used features of libCurl without checking the existence of them, causing compilation errors, which has been fixed. Also migrate the code to check feature macros, not version numbers, to cope better with libCurl that vendor ships with backported features.
The API to start showing progress meter after a short delay has been simplified. (merge 8aade107dd jc/simplify-progress later to maint).
Code clean-up to avoid mixing values read from the .gitmodules file and values read from the .git/config file.
We used to spend more than necessary cycles allocating and freeing piece of memory while writing each index entry out. This has been optimized.
Platforms that ship with a separate sha1 with collision detection library can link to it instead of using the copy we ship as part of our source tree.
Code around "notes" have been cleaned up. (merge 3964281524 mh/notes-cleanup later to maint).
The long-standing rule that an in-core lockfile instance, once it is used, must not be freed, has been lifted and the lockfile and tempfile APIs have been updated to reduce the chance of programming errors.
Our hashmap implementation in hashmap.[ch] is not thread-safe when adding a new item needs to expand the hashtable by rehashing; add an API to disable the automatic rehashing to work it around.
Many of our programs consider that it is OK to release dynamic storage that is used throughout the life of the program by simply exiting, but this makes it harder to leak detection tools to avoid reporting false positives. Plug many existing leaks and introduce a mechanism for developers to mark that the region of memory pointed by a pointer is not lost/leaking to help these tools.
As "git commit" to conclude a conflicted "git merge" honors the commit-msg hook, "git merge" that records a merge commit that cleanly auto-merges should, but it didn't.
The codepath for "git merge-recursive" has been cleaned up.
Many leaks of strbuf have been fixed.
"git imap-send" has our own implementation of the protocol and also can use more recent libCurl with the imap protocol support. Update the latter so that it can use the credential subsystem, and then make it the default option to use, so that we can eventually deprecate and remove the former.
"make style" runs git-clang-format to help developers by pointing out coding style issues.
A test to demonstrate "git mv" failing to adjust nested submodules has been added. (merge c514167df2 hv/mv-nested-submodules-test later to maint).
On Cygwin, "ulimit -s" does not report failure but it does not work at all, which causes an unexpected success of some tests that expect failures under a limited stack situation. This has been fixed.
Many codepaths have been updated to squelch -Wimplicit-fallthrough warnings from Gcc 7 (which is a good code hygiene).
Add a helper for DLL loading in anticipation for its need in a future topic RSN.
"git status --ignored", when noticing that a directory without any tracked path is ignored, still enumerated all the ignored paths in the directory, which is unnecessary. The codepath has been optimized to avoid this overhead.
The final batch to "git rebase -i" updates to move more code from the shell script to C has been merged.
Operations that do not touch (majority of) packed refs have been optimized by making accesses to packed-refs file lazy; we no longer pre-parse everything, and an access to a single ref in the packed-refs does not touch majority of irrelevant refs, either.
Add comment to clarify that the style file is meant to be used with clang-5 and the rules are still work in progress.
Many variables that points at a region of memory that will live throughout the life of the program have been marked with UNLEAK marker to help the leak checkers concentrate on real leaks..
Plans for weaning us off of SHA-1 has been documented.
A new "oidmap" API has been introduced and oidset API has been rewritten to use it.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.14:
"%C(color name)" in the pretty print format always produced ANSI color escape codes, which was an early design mistake. They now honor the configuration (e.g. "color.ui = never") and also tty-ness of the output medium.
The http.{sslkey,sslCert} configuration variables are to be interpreted as a pathname that honors "~[username]/" prefix, but weren't, which has been fixed.
Numerous bugs in walking of reflogs via "log -g" and friends have been fixed.
"git commit" when seeing an totally empty message said "you did not edit the message", which is clearly wrong. The message has been corrected.
When a directory is not readable, "gitweb" fails to build the project list. Work this around by skipping such a directory.
Some versions of GnuPG fails to kill gpg-agent it auto-spawned and such a left-over agent can interfere with a test. Work it around by attempting to kill one before starting a new test.
A recently added test for the "credential-cache" helper revealed that EOF detection done around the time the connection to the cache daemon is torn down were flaky. This was fixed by reacting to ECONNRESET and behaving as if we got an EOF.
"git log --tag=no-such-tag" showed log starting from HEAD, which has been fixed---it now shows nothing.
The "tag.pager" configuration variable was useless for those who actually create tag objects, as it interfered with the use of an editor. A new mechanism has been introduced for commands to enable pager depending on what operation is being carried out to fix this, and then "git tag -l" is made to run pager by default.
"git push --recurse-submodules $there HEAD:$target" was not propagated down to the submodules, but now it is.
Commands like "git rebase" accepted the --rerere-autoupdate option from the command line, but did not always use it. This has been fixed.
"git clone --recurse-submodules --quiet" did not pass the quiet option down to submodules.
Test portability fix for OBSD.
Portability fix for OBSD.
"git am -s" has been taught that some input may end with a trailer block that is not Signed-off-by: and it should refrain from adding an extra blank line before adding a new sign-off in such a case.
"git svn" used with "--localtime" option did not compute the tz offset for the timestamp in question and instead always used the current time, which has been corrected.
Memory leak in an error codepath has been plugged.
"git stash -u" used the contents of the committed version of the ".gitignore" file to decide which paths are ignored, even when the file has local changes. The command has been taught to instead use the locally modified contents.
bash 4.4 or newer gave a warning on NUL byte in command substitution done in "git stash"; this has been squelched.
"git grep -L" and "git grep --quiet -L" reported different exit codes; this has been corrected.
When handshake with a subprocess filter notices that the process asked for an unknown capability, Git did not report what program the offending subprocess was running. This has been corrected.
"git apply" that is used as a better "patch -p1" failed to apply a taken from a file with CRLF line endings to a file with CRLF line endings. The root cause was because it misused convert_to_git() that tried to do "safe-crlf" processing by looking at the index entry at the same path, which is a nonsense---in that mode, "apply" is not working on the data in (or derived from) the index at all. This has been fixed.
Killing "git merge --edit" before the editor returns control left the repository in a state with MERGE_MSG but without MERGE_HEAD, which incorrectly tells the subsequent "git commit" that there was a squash merge in progress. This has been fixed.
"git archive" did not work well with pathspecs and the export-ignore attribute.
In addition to "cc: # cruft", "cc: [email protected] # cruft" was taught to "git send-email" as a valid way to tell it that it needs to also send a carbon copy to in the trailer section.
"git branch -M a b" while on a branch that is completely unrelated to either branch a or branch b misbehaved when multiple worktree was in use. This has been fixed. (merge 31824d180d nd/worktree-kill-parse-ref later to maint).
"git gc" and friends when multiple worktrees are used off of a single repository did not consider the index and per-worktree refs of other worktrees as the root for reachability traversal, making objects that are in use only in other worktrees to be subject to garbage collection.
A regression to "gitk --bisect" by a recent update has been fixed.
"git -c submodule.recurse=yes pull" did not work as if the "--recurse-submodules" option was given from the command line. This has been corrected.
Unlike "git commit-tree < file", "git commit-tree -F file" did not pass the contents of the file verbatim and instead completed an incomplete line at the end, if exists. The latter has been updated to match the behaviour of the former.
Many codepaths did not diagnose write failures correctly when disks go full, due to their misuse of write_in_full() helper function, which have been corrected. (merge f48ecd38cb jk/write-in-full-fix later to maint).
"git help co" now says "co is aliased to ...", not "git co is". (merge b3a8076e0d ks/help-alias-label later to maint).
"git archive", especially when used with pathspec, stored an empty directory in its output, even though Git itself never does so. This has been fixed.
API error-proofing which happens to also squelch warnings from GCC.
The explanation of the cut-line in the commit log editor has been slightly tweaked. (merge 8c4b1a3593 ks/commit-do-not-touch-cut-line later to maint).
"git gc" tries to avoid running two instances at the same time by reading and writing pid/host from and to a lock file; it used to use an incorrect fscanf() format when reading, which has been corrected.
The scripts to drive TravisCI has been reorganized and then an optimization to avoid spending cycles on a branch whose tip is tagged has been implemented. (merge 8376eb4a8f ls/travis-scriptify later to maint).
The test linter has been taught that we do not like "echo -e".
Code cmp.std.c nitpick.
A regression fix for 2.11 that made the code to read the list of alternate object stores overrun the end of the string. (merge f0f7bebef7 jk/info-alternates-fix later to maint).
"git describe --match" learned to take multiple patterns in v2.13 series, but the feature ignored the patterns after the first one and did not work at all. This has been fixed.
"git filter-branch" cannot reproduce a history with a tag without the tagger field, which only ancient versions of Git allowed to be created. This has been corrected. (merge b2c1ca6b4b ic/fix-filter-branch-to-handle-tag-without-tagger later to maint).
"git cat-file --textconv" started segfaulting recently, which has been corrected.
The built-in pattern to detect the "function header" for HTML did not match .. elements without any attributes, which has been fixed.
"git mailinfo" was loose in decoding quoted printable and produced garbage when the two letters after the equal sign are not hexadecimal. This has been fixed.
The machinery to create xdelta used in pack files received the sizes of the data in size_t, but lost the higher bits of them by storing them in "unsigned int" during the computation, which is fixed.
The delta format used in the packfile cannot reference data at offset larger than what can be expressed in 4-byte, but the generator for the data failed to make sure the offset does not overflow. This has been corrected.
The documentation for '-X' for merges was misleadingly written to suggest that "-s theirs" exists, which is not the case.
"git fast-export" with -M/-C option issued "copy" instruction on a path that is simultaneously modified, which was incorrect. (merge b3e8ca89cf jt/fast-export-copy-modify-fix later to maint).
Many codepaths have been updated to squelch -Wsign-compare warnings. (merge 071bcaab64 rj/no-sign-compare later to maint).
Memory leaks in various codepaths have been plugged. (merge 4d01a7fa65 ma/leakplugs later to maint).
Recent versions of "git rev-parse --parseopt" did not parse the option specification that does not have the optional flags (*=?!) correctly, which has been corrected. (merge a6304fa4c2 bc/rev-parse-parseopt-fix later to maint).
The checkpoint command "git fast-import" did not flush updates to refs and marks unless at least one object was created since the last checkpoint, which has been corrected, as these things can happen without any new object getting created. (merge 30e215a65c er/fast-import-dump-refs-on-checkpoint later to maint).
Spell the name of our system as "Git" in the output from request-pull script.
Fixes for a handful memory access issues identified by valgrind.
Backports a moral equivalent of 2015 fix to the poll() emulation from the upstream gnulib to fix occasional breakages on HPE NonStop.
Users with "color.ui = always" in their configuration were broken by a recent change that made plumbing commands to pay attention to them as the patch created internally by "git add -p" were colored (heh) and made unusable. This has been fixed by reverting the offending change.
In the "--format=..." option of the "git for-each-ref" command (and its friends, i.e. the listing mode of "git branch/tag"), "%(atom:)" (e.g. "%(refname:)", "%(body:)" used to error out. Instead, treat them as if the colon and an empty string that follows it were not there.
An ancient bug that made Git misbehave with creation/renaming of refs has been fixed.
"git fetch :" allows an object name on the side when the other side accepts such a request since Git v2.5, but the documentation was left stale. (merge 83558a412a jc/fetch-refspec-doc-update later to maint).
Update the documentation for "git filter-branch" so that the filter options are listed in the same order as they are applied, as described in an earlier part of the doc. (merge 07c4984508 dg/filter-branch-filter-order-doc later to maint).
A possible oom error is now caught as a fatal error, instead of continuing and dereferencing NULL. (merge 55d7d15847 ao/path-use-xmalloc later to maint).
OTHER MINOR DOC, TEST AND BUILD UPDATES AND CODE CLEANUPS:
(merge f094b89a4d ma/parse-maybe-bool later to maint).
(merge 6cdf8a7929 ma/ts-cleanups later to maint).
(merge 7560f547e6 ma/up-to-date later to maint).
(merge 0db3dc75f3 rs/apply-epoch later to maint).
(merge 276d0e35c0 ma/split-symref-update-fix later to maint).
(merge f777623514 ks/branch-tweak-error-message-for-extra-args later to maint).
(merge 33f3c683ec ks/verify-filename-non-option-error-message-tweak later to maint).
(merge 7cbbf9d6a2 ls/filter-process-delayed later to maint).
(merge 488aa65c8f wk/merge-options-gpg-sign-doc later to maint).
(merge e61cb19a27 jc/branch-force-doc-readability-fix later to maint).
(merge 32fceba3fd np/config-path-doc later to maint).
(merge e38c681fb7 sb/rev-parse-show-superproject-root later to maint).
(merge 4f851dc883 sg/rev-list-doc-reorder-fix later to maint).

New in Git 2.15.0 RC 1 (Oct 11, 2017)

UI, Workflows & Features:
An example that is now obsolete has been removed from a sample hook, and an old example in it that added a sign-off manually has been improved to use the interpret-trailers command.
The advice message given when "git rebase" stops for conflicting changes has been improved.
The "rerere-train" script (in contrib/) learned the "--overwrite" option to allow overwriting existing recorded resolutions.
"git contacts" (in contrib/) now lists the address on the "Reported-by:" trailer to its output, in addition to those on S-o-b: and other trailers, to make it easier to notify (and thank) the original bug reporter.
"git rebase", especially when it is run by mistake and ends up trying to replay many changes, spent long time in silence. The command has been taught to show progress report when it spends long time preparing these many changes to replay (which would give the user a chance to abort with ^C).
"git merge" learned a "--signoff" option to add the Signed-off-by: trailer with the committer's name.
"git diff" learned to optionally paint new lines that are the same as deleted lines elsewhere differently from genuinely new lines.
"git interpret-trailers" learned to take the trailer specifications from the command line that overrides the configured values.
"git interpret-trailers" has been taught a "--parse" and a few other options to make it easier for scripts to grab existing trailer lines from a commit log message.
The "--format=%(trailers)" option "git log" and its friends take learned to take the 'unfold' and 'only' modifiers to normalize its output, e.g. "git log --format=%(trailers:only,unfold)".
"gitweb" shows a link to visit the 'raw' contents of blbos in the history overview page.
"[gc] rerereResolved = 5.days" used to be invalid, as the variable is defined to take an integer counting the number of days. It now is allowed.
The code to acquire a lock on a reference (e.g. while accepting a push from a client) used to immediately fail when the reference is already locked---now it waits for a very short while and retries, which can make it succeed if the lock holder was holding it during a read-only operation.
"branch --set-upstream" that has been deprecated in Git 1.8 has finally been retired.
The codepath to call external process filter for smudge/clean operation learned to show the progress meter.
"git rev-parse" learned "--is-shallow-repository", that is to be used in a way similar to existing "--is-bare-repository" and friends.
"git describe --match " has been taught to play well with the "--all" option.
"git branch" learned "-c/-C" to create a new branch by copying an existing one.
Some commands (most notably "git status") makes an opportunistic update when performing a read-only operation to help optimize later operations in the same repository. The new "--no-optional-locks" option can be passed to Git to disable them.
"git for-each-ref --format=..." learned a new format element, %(trailers), to show only the commit log trailer part of the log message.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
Start using selected c99 constructs in small, stable and essentialpart of the system to catch people who care about older compilers that do not grok them.
The filter-process interface learned to allow a process with long latency give a "delayed" response.
Many uses of comparision callback function the hashmap API uses cast the callback function type when registering it to hashmap_init(), which defeats the compile time type checking when the callback interface changes (e.g. gaining more parameters). The callback implementations have been updated to take "void *" pointers and cast them to the type they expect instead.
Because recent Git for Windows do come with a real msgfmt, the build procedure for git-gui has been updated to use it instead of a hand-rolled substitute.
"git grep --recurse-submodules" has been reworked to give a more consistent output across submodule boundary (and do its thing without having to fork a separate process).
A helper function to read a single whole line into strbuf mistakenly triggered OOM error at EOF under certain conditions, which has been fixed. (merge 642956cf45 rs/strbuf-getwholeline-fix later to maint).
The "ref-store" code reorganization continues.
"git commit" used to discard the index and re-read from the filesystem just in case the pre-commit hook has updated it in the middle; this has been optimized out when we know we do not run the pre-commit hook. (merge 680ee550d7 kw/commit-keep-index-when-pre-commit-is-not-run later to maint).
Updates to the HTTP layer we made recently unconditionally used features of libCurl without checking the existence of them, causing compilation errors, which has been fixed. Also migrate the code to check feature macros, not version numbers, to cope better with libCurl that vendor ships with backported features.
The API to start showing progress meter after a short delay has been simplified. (merge 8aade107dd jc/simplify-progress later to maint).
Code clean-up to avoid mixing values read from the .gitmodules file and values read from the .git/config file.
We used to spend more than necessary cycles allocating and freeing piece of memory while writing each index entry out. This has been optimized.
Platforms that ship with a separate sha1 with collision detection library can link to it instead of using the copy we ship as part of our source tree.
Code around "notes" have been cleaned up. (merge 3964281524 mh/notes-cleanup later to maint).
The long-standing rule that an in-core lockfile instance, once it is used, must not be freed, has been lifted and the lockfile and tempfile APIs have been updated to reduce the chance of programming errors.
Our hashmap implementation in hashmap.[ch] is not thread-safe when adding a new item needs to expand the hashtable by rehashing; add an API to disable the automatic rehashing to work it around.
Many of our programs consider that it is OK to release dynamic storage that is used throughout the life of the program by simply exiting, but this makes it harder to leak detection tools to avoid reporting false positives. Plug many existing leaks and introduce a mechanism for developers to mark that the region of memory pointed by a pointer is not lost/leaking to help these tools.
As "git commit" to conclude a conflicted "git merge" honors the commit-msg hook, "git merge" that records a merge commit that cleanly auto-merges should, but it didn't.
The codepath for "git merge-recursive" has been cleaned up.
Many leaks of strbuf have been fixed.
"git imap-send" has our own implementation of the protocol and also can use more recent libCurl with the imap protocol support. Update the latter so that it can use the credential subsystem, and then make it the default option to use, so that we can eventually deprecate and remove the former.
"make style" runs git-clang-format to help developers by pointing out coding style issues.
A test to demonstrate "git mv" failing to adjust nested submodules has been added. (merge c514167df2 hv/mv-nested-submodules-test later to maint).
On Cygwin, "ulimit -s" does not report failure but it does not work at all, which causes an unexpected success of some tests that expect failures under a limited stack situation. This has been fixed.
Many codepaths have been updated to squelch -Wimplicit-fallthrough warnings from Gcc 7 (which is a good code hygiene).
Add a helper for DLL loading in anticipation for its need in a future topic RSN.
"git status --ignored", when noticing that a directory without any tracked path is ignored, still enumerated all the ignored paths in the directory, which is unnecessary. The codepath has been optimized to avoid this overhead.
The final batch to "git rebase -i" updates to move more code from the shell script to C has been merged.
Operations that do not touch (majority of) packed refs have been optimized by making accesses to packed-refs file lazy; we no longer pre-parse everything, and an access to a single ref in the packed-refs does not touch majority of irrelevant refs, either.
Add comment to clarify that the style file is meant to be used with clang-5 and the rules are still work in progress.
Many variables that points at a region of memory that will live throughout the life of the program have been marked with UNLEAK marker to help the leak checkers concentrate on real leaks..
Plans for weaning us off of SHA-1 has been documented.
A new "oidmap" API has been introduced and oidset API has been rewritten to use it.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes:
"%C(color name)" in the pretty print format always produced ANSI color escape codes, which was an early design mistake. They now honor the configuration (e.g. "color.ui = never") and also tty-ness of the output medium.
The http.{sslkey,sslCert} configuration variables are to be interpreted as a pathname that honors "~[username]/" prefix, but weren't, which has been fixed.
Numerous bugs in walking of reflogs via "log -g" and friends have been fixed.
"git commit" when seeing an totally empty message said "you did not edit the message", which is clearly wrong. The message has been corrected.
When a directory is not readable, "gitweb" fails to build the project list. Work this around by skipping such a directory.
Some versions of GnuPG fails to kill gpg-agent it auto-spawned and such a left-over agent can interfere with a test. Work it around by attempting to kill one before starting a new test.
A recently added test for the "credential-cache" helper revealed that EOF detection done around the time the connection to the cache daemon is torn down were flaky. This was fixed by reacting to ECONNRESET and behaving as if we got an EOF.
"git log --tag=no-such-tag" showed log starting from HEAD, which has been fixed---it now shows nothing.
The "tag.pager" configuration variable was useless for those who actually create tag objects, as it interfered with the use of an editor. A new mechanism has been introduced for commands to enable pager depending on what operation is being carried out to fix this, and then "git tag -l" is made to run pager by default.
"git push --recurse-submodules $there HEAD:$target" was not propagated down to the submodules, but now it is.
Commands like "git rebase" accepted the --rerere-autoupdate option from the command line, but did not always use it. This has been fixed.
"git clone --recurse-submodules --quiet" did not pass the quiet option down to submodules.
Test portability fix for OBSD.
Portability fix for OBSD.
"git am -s" has been taught that some input may end with a trailer block that is not Signed-off-by: and it should refrain from adding an extra blank line before adding a new sign-off in such a case.
"git svn" used with "--localtime" option did not compute the tz offset for the timestamp in question and instead always used the current time, which has been corrected.
Memory leak in an error codepath has been plugged.
"git stash -u" used the contents of the committed version of the ".gitignore" file to decide which paths are ignored, even when the file has local changes. The command has been taught to instead use the locally modified contents.
bash 4.4 or newer gave a warning on NUL byte in command substitution done in "git stash"; this has been squelched.
"git grep -L" and "git grep --quiet -L" reported different exit codes; this has been corrected.
When handshake with a subprocess filter notices that the process asked for an unknown capability, Git did not report what program the offending subprocess was running. This has been corrected.
"git apply" that is used as a better "patch -p1" failed to apply a taken from a file with CRLF line endings to a file with CRLF line endings. The root cause was because it misused convert_to_git() that tried to do "safe-crlf" processing by looking at the index entry at the same path, which is a nonsense---in that mode, "apply" is not working on the data in (or derived from) the index at all. This has been fixed.
Killing "git merge --edit" before the editor returns control left the repository in a state with MERGE_MSG but without MERGE_HEAD, which incorrectly tells the subsequent "git commit" that there was a squash merge in progress. This has been fixed.
"git archive" did not work well with pathspecs and the export-ignore attribute.
In addition to "cc: # cruft", "cc: [email protected] # cruft" was taught to "git send-email" as a valid way to tell it that it needs to also send a carbon copy to in the trailer section. (merge cc90750677 mm/send-email-cc-cruft later to maint).
"git branch -M a b" while on a branch that is completely unrelated to either branch a or branch b misbehaved when multiple worktree was in use. This has been fixed. (merge 31824d180d nd/worktree-kill-parse-ref later to maint).
"git gc" and friends when multiple worktrees are used off of a single repository did not consider the index and per-worktree refs of other worktrees as the root for reachability traversal, making objects that are in use only in other worktrees to be subject to garbage collection.
A regression to "gitk --bisect" by a recent update has been fixed. (merge 1d0538e486 mh/packed-ref-store-prep later to maint).
"git -c submodule.recurse=yes pull" did not work as if the "--recurse-submodules" option was given from the command line. This has been corrected.
Unlike "git commit-tree < file", "git commit-tree -F file" did not pass the contents of the file verbatim and instead completed an incomplete line at the end, if exists. The latter has been updated to match the behaviour of the former. (merge c818e74332 rk/commit-tree-make-F-verbatim later to maint).
Many codepaths did not diagnose write failures correctly when disks go full, due to their misuse of write_in_full() helper function, which have been corrected. (merge f48ecd38cb jk/write-in-full-fix later to maint).
"git help co" now says "co is aliased to ...", not "git co is". (merge b3a8076e0d ks/help-alias-label later to maint).
"git archive", especially when used with pathspec, stored an empty directory in its output, even though Git itself never does so. This has been fixed. (merge 4318094047 rs/archive-excluded-directory later to maint).
API error-proofing which happens to also squelch warnings from GCC. (merge c788c54cde tg/refs-allowed-flags later to maint).
The explanation of the cut-line in the commit log editor has been slightly tweaked. (merge 8c4b1a3593 ks/commit-do-not-touch-cut-line later to maint).
"git gc" tries to avoid running two instances at the same time by reading and writing pid/host from and to a lock file; it used to use an incorrect fscanf() format when reading, which has been corrected. (merge afe2fab72c aw/gc-lockfile-fscanf-fix later to maint).
The scripts to drive TravisCI has been reorganized and then an optimization to avoid spending cycles on a branch whose tip is tagged has been implemented. (merge 8376eb4a8f ls/travis-scriptify later to maint).
The test linter has been taught that we do not like "echo -e". (merge 1a6d46895d tb/test-lint-echo-e later to maint).
Code cmp.std.c nitpick. (merge ac7da78ede mh/for-each-string-list-item-empty-fix later to maint).
A regression fix for 2.11 that made the code to read the list of alternate object stores overrun the end of the string. (merge f0f7bebef7 jk/info-alternates-fix later to maint).
"git describe --match" learned to take multiple patterns in v2.13 series, but the feature ignored the patterns after the first one and did not work at all. This has been fixed. (merge da769d2986 jk/describe-omit-some-refs later to maint).
"git filter-branch" cannot reproduce a history with a tag without the tagger field, which only ancient versions of Git allowed to be created. This has been corrected. (merge b2c1ca6b4b ic/fix-filter-branch-to-handle-tag-without-tagger later to maint).
"git cat-file --textconv" started segfaulting recently, which has been corrected. (merge cc0ea7c9e5 jk/diff-blob later to maint).
The built-in pattern to detect the "function header" for HTML did not match .. elements without any attributes, which has been fixed. (merge 9c03caca2c ik/userdiff-html-h-element-fix later to maint).
"git mailinfo" was loose in decoding quoted printable and produced garbage when the two letters after the equal sign are not hexadecimal. This has been fixed. (merge c8cf423eab rs/mailinfo-qp-decode-fix later to maint).
The machinery to create xdelta used in pack files received the sizes of the data in size_t, but lost the higher bits of them by storing them in "unsigned int" during the computation, which is fixed.
The delta format used in the packfile cannot reference data at offset larger than what can be expressed in 4-byte, but the generator for the data failed to make sure the offset does not overflow. This has been corrected.
The documentation for '-X' for merges was misleadingly written to suggest that "-s theirs" exists, which is not the case. (merge c25d98b2a7 jc/merge-x-theirs-docfix later to maint).
"git fast-export" with -M/-C option issued "copy" instruction on a path that is simultaneously modified, which was incorrect. (merge b3e8ca89cf jt/fast-export-copy-modify-fix later to maint).
Many codepaths have been updated to squelch -Wsign-compare warnings. (merge 071bcaab64 rj/no-sign-compare later to maint).
Memory leaks in various codepaths have been plugged. (merge 4d01a7fa65 ma/leakplugs later to maint).
Recent versions of "git rev-parse --parseopt" did not parse the option specification that does not have the optional flags (*=?!) correctly, which has been corrected. (merge a6304fa4c2 bc/rev-parse-parseopt-fix later to maint).
The checkpoint command "git fast-import" did not flush updates to refs and marks unless at least one object was created since the last checkpoint, which has been corrected, as these things can happen without any new object getting created. (merge 30e215a65c er/fast-import-dump-refs-on-checkpoint later to maint).
Spell the name of our system as "Git" in the output from request-pull script. (merge e66d7c37a5 ar/request-pull-phrasofix later to maint).
Fixes for a handful memory access issues identified by valgrind. (merge 2944a94c6b tg/memfixes later to maint).
Backports a moral equivalent of 2015 fix to the poll() emulation from the upstream gnulib to fix occasional breakages on HPE NonStop. (merge 61b2a1acaa rb/compat-poll-fix later to maint).
Users with "color.ui = always" in their configuration were broken by a recent change that made plumbing commands to pay attention to them as the patch created internally by "git add -p" were colored (heh) and made unusable. Fix this regression by redefining 'always' to mean the same thing as 'auto'. (merge 6be4595edb jk/ui-color-always-to-auto-maint later to maint).
In the "--format=..." option of the "git for-each-ref" command (and its friends, i.e. the listing mode of "git branch/tag"), "%(atom:)" (e.g. "%(refname:)", "%(body:)" used to error out. Instead, treat them as if the colon and an empty string that follows it were not there. (merge bea4dbeafd tb/ref-filter-empty-modifier later to maint).
An ancient bug that made Git misbehave with creation/renaming of refs has been fixed.
Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.

New in Git 2.15 RC 0 (Oct 6, 2017)

BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY NOTES AND OTHER NOTABLE CHANGES:
Use of an empty string as a pathspec element that is used for 'everything matches' is still warned and Git asks users to use a more explicit '.' for that instead. The hope is that existing users will not mind this change, and eventually the warning can be turned into a hard error, upgrading the deprecation into removal of this (mis)feature. That is now scheduled to happen in the upcoming release.
Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository. A corner case that happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG"). We've tried hard to locate such cases and fixed them, but there might still be cases that need to be addressed--bug reports are greatly appreciated.
"branch --set-upstream" that has been deprecated in Git 1.8 has finally been retired.
UPDATES SINCE V2.14:
UI, Workflows & Features:
An example that is now obsolete has been removed from a sample hook, and an old example in it that added a sign-off manually has been improved to use the interpret-trailers command.
The advice message given when "git rebase" stops for conflicting changes has been improved.
The "rerere-train" script (in contrib/) learned the "--overwrite" option to allow overwriting existing recorded resolutions.
"git contacts" (in contrib/) now lists the address on the "Reported-by:" trailer to its output, in addition to those on S-o-b: and other trailers, to make it easier to notify (and thank) the original bug reporter.
"git rebase", especially when it is run by mistake and ends up trying to replay many changes, spent long time in silence. The command has been taught to show progress report when it spends long time preparing these many changes to replay (which would give the user a chance to abort with ^C).
"git merge" learned a "--signoff" option to add the Signed-off-by: trailer with the committer's name.
"git diff" learned to optionally paint new lines that are the same as deleted lines elsewhere differently from genuinely new lines.
"git interpret-trailers" learned to take the trailer specifications from the command line that overrides the configured values.
"git interpret-trailers" has been taught a "--parse" and a few other options to make it easier for scripts to grab existing trailer lines from a commit log message.
"gitweb" shows a link to visit the 'raw' contents of blbos in the history overview page.
"[gc] rerereResolved = 5.days" used to be invalid, as the variable is defined to take an integer counting the number of days. It now is allowed.
The code to acquire a lock on a reference (e.g. while accepting a push from a client) used to immediately fail when the reference is already locked---now it waits for a very short while and retries, which can make it succeed if the lock holder was holding it during a read-only operation.
"branch --set-upstream" that has been deprecated in Git 1.8 has finally been retired.
The codepath to call external process filter for smudge/clean operation learned to show the progress meter.
"git rev-parse" learned "--is-shallow-repository", that is to be used in a way similar to existing "--is-bare-repository" and friends.
"git describe --match " has been taught to play well with the "--all" option.
"git branch" learned "-c/-C" to create a new branch by copying an existing one.
Some commands (most notably "git status") makes an opportunistic update when performing a read-only operation to help optimize later operations in the same repository. The new "--no-optional-locks" option can be passed to Git to disable them.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
Start using selected c99 constructs in small, stable and essentialpart of the system to catch people who care about older compilers that do not grok them.
The filter-process interface learned to allow a process with long latency give a "delayed" response.
Many uses of comparision callback function the hashmap API uses cast the callback function type when registering it to hashmap_init(), which defeats the compile time type checking when the callback interface changes (e.g. gaining more parameters). The callback implementations have been updated to take "void *" pointers and cast them to the type they expect instead.
Because recent Git for Windows do come with a real msgfmt, the build procedure for git-gui has been updated to use it instead of a hand-rolled substitute.
"git grep --recurse-submodules" has been reworked to give a more consistent output across submodule boundary (and do its thing without having to fork a separate process).
A helper function to read a single whole line into strbuf mistakenly triggered OOM error at EOF under certain conditions, which has been fixed. (merge 642956cf45 rs/strbuf-getwholeline-fix later to maint).
The "ref-store" code reorganization continues.
"git commit" used to discard the index and re-read from the filesystem just in case the pre-commit hook has updated it in the middle; this has been optimized out when we know we do not run the pre-commit hook. (merge 680ee550d7 kw/commit-keep-index-when-pre-commit-is-not-run later to maint).
Updates to the HTTP layer we made recently unconditionally used features of libCurl without checking the existence of them, causing compilation errors, which has been fixed. Also migrate the code to check feature macros, not version numbers, to cope better with libCurl that vendor ships with backported features.
The API to start showing progress meter after a short delay has been simplified. (merge 8aade107dd jc/simplify-progress later to maint).
Code clean-up to avoid mixing values read from the .gitmodules file and values read from the .git/config file.
We used to spend more than necessary cycles allocating and freeing piece of memory while writing each index entry out. This has been optimized.
Platforms that ship with a separate sha1 with collision detection library can link to it instead of using the copy we ship as part of our source tree.
Code around "notes" have been cleaned up. (merge 3964281524 mh/notes-cleanup later to maint).
The long-standing rule that an in-core lockfile instance, once it is used, must not be freed, has been lifted and the lockfile and tempfile APIs have been updated to reduce the chance of programming errors.
Our hashmap implementation in hashmap.[ch] is not thread-safe when adding a new item needs to expand the hashtable by rehashing; add an API to disable the automatic rehashing to work it around.
Many of our programs consider that it is OK to release dynamic storage that is used throughout the life of the program by simply exiting, but this makes it harder to leak detection tools to avoid reporting false positives. Plug many existing leaks and introduce a mechanism for developers to mark that the region of memory pointed by a pointer is not lost/leaking to help these tools.
As "git commit" to conclude a conflicted "git merge" honors the commit-msg hook, "git merge" that records a merge commit that cleanly auto-merges should, but it didn't.
The codepath for "git merge-recursive" has been cleaned up.
Many leaks of strbuf have been fixed.
"git imap-send" has our own implementation of the protocol and also can use more recent libCurl with the imap protocol support. Update the latter so that it can use the credential subsystem, and then make it the default option to use, so that we can eventually deprecate and remove the former.
"make style" runs git-clang-format to help developers by pointing out coding style issues.
A test to demonstrate "git mv" failing to adjust nested submodules has been added. (merge c514167df2 hv/mv-nested-submodules-test later to maint).
On Cygwin, "ulimit -s" does not report failure but it does not work at all, which causes an unexpected success of some tests that expect failures under a limited stack situation. This has been fixed.
Many codepaths have been updated to squelch -Wimplicit-fallthrough warnings from Gcc 7 (which is a good code hygiene).
Add a helper for DLL loading in anticipation for its need in a future topic RSN.
"git status --ignored", when noticing that a directory without any tracked path is ignored, still enumerated all the ignored paths in the directory, which is unnecessary. The codepath has been optimized to avoid this overhead.
The final batch to "git rebase -i" updates to move more code from the shell script to C has been merged.
Operations that do not touch (majority of) packed refs have been optimized by making accesses to packed-refs file lazy; we no longer pre-parse everything, and an access to a single ref in the packed-refs does not touch majority of irrelevant refs, either.
Add comment to clarify that the style file is meant to be used with clang-5 and the rules are still work in progress.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes since v2.14:
"%C(color name)" in the pretty print format always produced ANSI color escape codes, which was an early design mistake. They now honor the configuration (e.g. "color.ui = never") and also tty-ness of the output medium.
The http.{sslkey,sslCert} configuration variables are to be interpreted as a pathname that honors "~[username]/" prefix, but weren't, which has been fixed.
Numerous bugs in walking of reflogs via "log -g" and friends have been fixed.
"git commit" when seeing an totally empty message said "you did not edit the message", which is clearly wrong. The message has been corrected.
When a directory is not readable, "gitweb" fails to build the project list. Work this around by skipping such a directory.
Some versions of GnuPG fails to kill gpg-agent it auto-spawned and such a left-over agent can interfere with a test. Work it around by attempting to kill one before starting a new test.
A recently added test for the "credential-cache" helper revealed that EOF detection done around the time the connection to the cache daemon is torn down were flaky. This was fixed by reacting to ECONNRESET and behaving as if we got an EOF.
"git log --tag=no-such-tag" showed log starting from HEAD, which has been fixed---it now shows nothing.
The "tag.pager" configuration variable was useless for those who actually create tag objects, as it interfered with the use of an editor. A new mechanism has been introduced for commands to enable pager depending on what operation is being carried out to fix this, and then "git tag -l" is made to run pager by default.
"git push --recurse-submodules $there HEAD:$target" was not propagated down to the submodules, but now it is.
Commands like "git rebase" accepted the --rerere-autoupdate option from the command line, but did not always use it. This has been fixed.
"git clone --recurse-submodules --quiet" did not pass the quiet option down to submodules.
Test portability fix for OBSD.
Portability fix for OBSD.
"git am -s" has been taught that some input may end with a trailer block that is not Signed-off-by: and it should refrain from adding an extra blank line before adding a new sign-off in such a case.
"git svn" used with "--localtime" option did not compute the tz offset for the timestamp in question and instead always used the current time, which has been corrected.
Memory leak in an error codepath has been plugged.
"git stash -u" used the contents of the committed version of the ".gitignore" file to decide which paths are ignored, even when the file has local changes. The command has been taught to instead use the locally modified contents.
bash 4.4 or newer gave a warning on NUL byte in command substitution done in "git stash"; this has been squelched.
"git grep -L" and "git grep --quiet -L" reported different exit codes; this has been corrected.
When handshake with a subprocess filter notices that the process asked for an unknown capability, Git did not report what program the offending subprocess was running. This has been corrected.
"git apply" that is used as a better "patch -p1" failed to apply a taken from a file with CRLF line endings to a file with CRLF line endings. The root cause was because it misused convert_to_git() that tried to do "safe-crlf" processing by looking at the index entry at the same path, which is a nonsense---in that mode, "apply" is not working on the data in (or derived from) the index at all. This has been fixed.
Killing "git merge --edit" before the editor returns control left the repository in a state with MERGE_MSG but without MERGE_HEAD, which incorrectly tells the subsequent "git commit" that there was a squash merge in progress. This has been fixed.
"git archive" did not work well with pathspecs and the export-ignore attribute.
In addition to "cc: # cruft", "cc: [email protected] # cruft" was taught to "git send-email" as a valid way to tell it that it needs to also send a carbon copy to in the trailer section. (merge cc90750677 mm/send-email-cc-cruft later to maint).
"git branch -M a b" while on a branch that is completely unrelated to either branch a or branch b misbehaved when multiple worktree was in use. This has been fixed. (merge 31824d180d nd/worktree-kill-parse-ref later to maint).
"git gc" and friends when multiple worktrees are used off of a single repository did not consider the index and per-worktree refs of other worktrees as the root for reachability traversal, making objects that are in use only in other worktrees to be subject to garbage collection.
A regression to "gitk --bisect" by a recent update has been fixed. (merge 1d0538e486 mh/packed-ref-store-prep later to maint).
"git -c submodule.recurse=yes pull" did not work as if the "--recurse-submodules" option was given from the command line. This has been corrected.
Unlike "git commit-tree < file", "git commit-tree -F file" did not pass the contents of the file verbatim and instead completed an incomplete line at the end, if exists. The latter has been updated to match the behaviour of the former. (merge c818e74332 rk/commit-tree-make-F-verbatim later to maint).
Many codepaths did not diagnose write failures correctly when disks go full, due to their misuse of write_in_full() helper function, which have been corrected. (merge f48ecd38cb jk/write-in-full-fix later to maint).
"git help co" now says "co is aliased to ...", not "git co is". (merge b3a8076e0d ks/help-alias-label later to maint).
"git archive", especially when used with pathspec, stored an empty directory in its output, even though Git itself never does so. This has been fixed. (merge 4318094047 rs/archive-excluded-directory later to maint).
API error-proofing which happens to also squelch warnings from GCC. (merge c788c54cde tg/refs-allowed-flags later to maint).
The explanation of the cut-line in the commit log editor has been slightly tweaked. (merge 8c4b1a3593 ks/commit-do-not-touch-cut-line later to maint).
"git gc" tries to avoid running two instances at the same time by reading and writing pid/host from and to a lock file; it used to use an incorrect fscanf() format when reading, which has been corrected. (merge afe2fab72c aw/gc-lockfile-fscanf-fix later to maint).
The scripts to drive TravisCI has been reorganized and then an optimization to avoid spending cycles on a branch whose tip is tagged has been implemented. (merge 8376eb4a8f ls/travis-scriptify later to maint).
The test linter has been taught that we do not like "echo -e". (merge 1a6d46895d tb/test-lint-echo-e later to maint).
Code cmp.std.c nitpick. (merge ac7da78ede mh/for-each-string-list-item-empty-fix later to maint).
A regression fix for 2.11 that made the code to read the list of alternate object stores overrun the end of the string. (merge f0f7bebef7 jk/info-alternates-fix later to maint).
"git describe --match" learned to take multiple patterns in v2.13 series, but the feature ignored the patterns after the first one and did not work at all. This has been fixed. (merge da769d2986 jk/describe-omit-some-refs later to maint).
"git filter-branch" cannot reproduce a history with a tag without the tagger field, which only ancient versions of Git allowed to be created. This has been corrected. (merge b2c1ca6b4b ic/fix-filter-branch-to-handle-tag-without-tagger later to maint).
"git cat-file --textconv" started segfaulting recently, which has been corrected. (merge cc0ea7c9e5 jk/diff-blob later to maint).
The built-in pattern to detect the "function header" for HTML did not match .. elements without any attributes, which has been fixed. (merge 9c03caca2c ik/userdiff-html-h-element-fix later to maint).
"git mailinfo" was loose in decoding quoted printable and produced garbage when the two letters after the equal sign are not hexadecimal. This has been fixed. (merge c8cf423eab rs/mailinfo-qp-decode-fix later to maint).
The machinery to create xdelta used in pack files received the sizes of the data in size_t, but lost the higher bits of them by storing them in "unsigned int" during the computation, which is fixed.
The delta format used in the packfile cannot reference data at offset larger than what can be expressed in 4-byte, but the generator for the data failed to make sure the offset does not overflow. This has been corrected.
The documentation for '-X' for merges was misleadingly written to suggest that "-s theirs" exists, which is not the case. (merge c25d98b2a7 jc/merge-x-theirs-docfix later to maint).
"git fast-export" with -M/-C option issued "copy" instruction on a path that is simultaneously modified, which was incorrect. (merge b3e8ca89cf jt/fast-export-copy-modify-fix later to maint).
Many codepaths have been updated to squelch -Wsign-compare warnings. (merge 071bcaab64 rj/no-sign-compare later to maint).
Memory leaks in various codepaths have been plugged. (merge 4d01a7fa65 ma/leakplugs later to maint).
Recent versions of "git rev-parse --parseopt" did not parse the option specification that does not have the optional flags (*=?!) correctly, which has been corrected. (merge a6304fa4c2 bc/rev-parse-parseopt-fix later to maint).
The checkpoint command "git fast-import" did not flush updates to refs and marks unless at least one object was created since the last checkpoint, which has been corrected, as these things can happen without any new object getting created. (merge 30e215a65c er/fast-import-dump-refs-on-checkpoint later to maint).
Spell the name of our system as "Git" in the output from request-pull script. (merge e66d7c37a5 ar/request-pull-phrasofix later to maint).
Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.

New in Git 2.14.2 (Oct 6, 2017)

Fixes since v2.14.1:
Because recent Git for Windows do come with a real msgfmt, the build procedure for git-gui has been updated to use it instead of a hand-rolled substitute.
"%C(color name)" in the pretty print format always produced ANSI color escape codes, which was an early design mistake. They now honor the configuration (e.g. "color.ui = never") and also tty-ness of the output medium.
The http.{sslkey,sslCert} configuration variables are to be interpreted as a pathname that honors "~[username]/" prefix, but weren't, which has been fixed.
Numerous bugs in walking of reflogs via "log -g" and friends have been fixed.
"git commit" when seeing an totally empty message said "you did not edit the message", which is clearly wrong. The message has been corrected.
When a directory is not readable, "gitweb" fails to build the project list. Work this around by skipping such a directory.
A recently added test for the "credential-cache" helper revealed that EOF detection done around the time the connection to the cache daemon is torn down were flaky. This was fixed by reacting to ECONNRESET and behaving as if we got an EOF.
Some versions of GnuPG fail to kill gpg-agent it auto-spawned and such a left-over agent can interfere with a test. Work it around by attempting to kill one before starting a new test.
"git log --tag=no-such-tag" showed log starting from HEAD, which has been fixed---it now shows nothing.
The "tag.pager" configuration variable was useless for those who actually create tag objects, as it interfered with the use of an editor. A new mechanism has been introduced for commands to enable pager depending on what operation is being carried out to fix this, and then "git tag -l" is made to run pager by default.
"git push --recurse-submodules $there HEAD:$target" was not propagated down to the submodules, but now it is.
Commands like "git rebase" accepted the --rerere-autoupdate option from the command line, but did not always use it. This has been fixed.
"git clone --recurse-submodules --quiet" did not pass the quiet option down to submodules.
"git am -s" has been taught that some input may end with a trailer block that is not Signed-off-by: and it should refrain from adding an extra blank line before adding a new sign-off in such a case.
"git svn" used with "--localtime" option did not compute the tz offset for the timestamp in question and instead always used the current time, which has been corrected.
Memory leaks in a few error codepaths have been plugged.
bash 4.4 or newer gave a warning on NUL byte in command substitution done in "git stash"; this has been squelched.
"git grep -L" and "git grep --quiet -L" reported different exit codes; this has been corrected.
When handshake with a subprocess filter notices that the process asked for an unknown capability, Git did not report what program the offending subprocess was running. This has been corrected.
"git apply" that is used as a better "patch -p1" failed to apply a taken from a file with CRLF line endings to a file with CRLF line endings. The root cause was because it misused convert_to_git() that tried to do "safe-crlf" processing by looking at the index entry at the same path, which is a nonsense---in that mode, "apply" is not working on the data in (or derived from) the index at all. This has been fixed.
Killing "git merge --edit" before the editor returns control left the repository in a state with MERGE_MSG but without MERGE_HEAD, which incorrectly tells the subsequent "git commit" that there was a squash merge in progress. This has been fixed.
"git archive" did not work well with pathspecs and the export-ignore attribute.
"git cvsserver" no longer is invoked by "git daemon" by default, as it is old and largely unmaintained.
Various Perl scripts did not use safe_pipe_capture() instead of backticks, leaving them susceptible to end-user input. They have been corrected.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.14.1 (Aug 11, 2017)

New in Git 2.14.0 (Aug 5, 2017)

Backward compatibility notes and other notable changes:
Use of an empty string as a pathspec element that is used for 'everything matches' is still warned and Git asks users to use a more explicit '.' for that instead. The hope is that existing users will not mind this change, and eventually the warning can be turned into a hard error, upgrading the deprecation into removal of this (mis)feature. That is not scheduled to happen in the upcoming release (yet).
Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository. A corner case that happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG"). We've tried hard to locate such cases and fixed them, but there might still be cases that need to be addressed--bug reports are greatly appreciated.
The experiment to improve the hunk-boundary selection of textual diff output has finished, and the "indent heuristics" has now become the default.
Git can now be built with PCRE v2 instead of v1 of the PCRE library. Replace USE_LIBPCRE=YesPlease with USE_LIBPCRE2=YesPlease in existing build scripts to build against the new version. As the upstream PCRE maintainer has abandoned v1 maintenance for all but the most critical bug fixes, use of v2 is recommended.
UI, Workflows & Features:
The colors in which "git status --short --branch" showed the names of the current branch and its remote-tracking branch are now configurable.
"git clone" learned the "--no-tags" option not to fetch all tags initially, and also set up the tagopt not to follow any tags in subsequent fetches.
"git archive --format=zip" learned to use zip64 extension when necessary to go beyond the 4GB limit.
"git reset" learned "--recurse-submodules" option.
"git diff --submodule=diff" now recurses into nested submodules.
"git repack" learned to accept the --threads= option and pass it to pack-objects.
"git send-email" learned to run sendemail-validate hook to inspect and reject a message before sending it out.
There is no good reason why "git fetch $there $sha1" should fail when the $sha1 names an object at the tip of an advertised ref, even when the other side hasn't enabled allowTipSHA1InWant.
The "[includeIf "gitdir:$dir"] path=..." mechanism introduced in 2.13.0 would canonicalize the path of the gitdir being matched, and did not match e.g. "gitdir:~/work/*" against a repo in "~/work/main" if "~/work" was a symlink to "/mnt/storage/work". Now we match both the resolved canonical path and what "pwd" would show. The include will happen if either one matches.
The "indent" heuristics is now the default in "diff". The diff.indentHeuristic configuration variable can be set to "false" for those who do not want it.
Many commands learned to pay attention to submodule.recurse configuration.
The convention for a command line is to follow "git cmdname --options" with revisions followed by an optional "--" disambiguator and then finally pathspecs. When "--" is not there, we make sure early ones are all interpretable as revs (and do not look like paths) and later ones are the other way around. A pathspec with "magic" (e.g. ":/p/a/t/h" that matches p/a/t/h from the top-level of the working tree, no matter what subdirectory you are working from) are conservatively judged as "not a path", which required disambiguation more often. The command line parser learned to say "it's a pathspec" a bit more often when the syntax looks like so.
Update "perl-compatible regular expression" support to enable JIT and also allow linking with the newer PCRE v2 library.
"filter-branch" learned a pseudo filter "--setup" that can be used to define common functions/variables that can be used by other filters.
Using "git add d/i/r" when d/i/r is the top of the working tree of a separate repository would create a gitlink in the index, which would appear as a not-quite-initialized submodule to others. We learned to give warnings when this happens.
"git status" learned to optionally give how many stash entries there are in its output.
"git status" has long shown essentially the same message as "git commit"; the message it gives while preparing for the root commit, i.e. "Initial commit", was hard to understand for some new users. Now it says "No commits yet" to stress more on the current status (rather than the commit the user is preparing for, which is more in line with the focus of "git commit").
"git send-email" now has --batch-size and --relogin-delay options which can be used to overcome limitations on SMTP servers that restrict on how many of e-mails can be sent in a single session.
An old message shown in the commit log template was removed, as it has outlived its usefulness.
"git pull --rebase --recurse-submodules" learns to rebase the branch in the submodules to an updated base.
"git log" learned -P as a synonym for --perl-regexp, "git grep" already had such a synonym.
"git log" didn't understand --regexp-ignore-case when combined with --perl-regexp. This has been fixed.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
The default packed-git limit value has been raised on larger platforms to save "git fetch" from a (recoverable) failure while "gc" is running in parallel.
Code to update the cache-tree has been tightened so that we won't accidentally write out any 0{40} entry in the tree object.
Attempt to allow us notice "fishy" situation where we fail to remove the temporary directory used during the test.
Travis CI gained a task to format the documentation with both AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor.
Some platforms have ulong that is smaller than time_t, and our historical use of ulong for timestamp would mean they cannot represent some timestamp that the platform allows. Invent a separate and dedicated timestamp_t (so that we can distingiuish timestamps and a vanilla ulongs, which along is already a good move), and then declare uintmax_t is the type to be used as the timestamp_t.
We can trigger Windows auto-build tester (credits: Dscho & Microsoft) from our existing Travis CI tester now.
Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
Simplify parse_pathspec() codepath and stop it from looking at the default in-core index.
Add perf-test for wildmatch.
Code from "conversion using external process" codepath has been extracted to a separate sub-process.[ch] module.
When "git checkout", "git merge", etc. manipulates the in-core index, various pieces of information in the index extensions are discarded from the original state, as it is usually not the case that they are kept up-to-date and in-sync with the operation on the main index. The untracked cache extension is copied across these operations now, which would speed up "git status" (as long as the cache is properly invalidated).
The internal implementation of "git grep" has seen some clean-up.
Update the C style recommendation for notes for translators, as recent versions of gettext tools can work with our style of multi-line comments.
The implementation of "ref" API around the "packed refs" have been cleaned up, in preparation for further changes.
The internal logic used in "git blame" has been libified to make it easier to use by cgit.
Our code often opens a path to an optional file, to work on its contents when we can successfully open it. We can ignore a failure to open if such an optional file does not exist, but we do want to report a failure in opening for other reasons (e.g. we got an I/O error, or the file is there, but we lack the permission to open).
The exact errors we need to ignore are ENOENT (obviously) and ENOTDIR (less obvious). Instead of repeating comparison of errno with these two constants, introduce a helper function to do so.
We often try to open a file for reading whose existence is optional, and silently ignore errors from open/fopen; report such errors if they are not due to missing files.
When an existing repository is used for t/perf testing, we first create bit-for-bit copy of it, which may grab a transient state of the repository and freeze it into the repository used for testing, which then may cause Git operations to fail. Single out "the index being locked" case and forcibly drop the lock from the copy.
Three instances of the same helper function have been consolidated to one.
"fast-import" uses a default pack chain depth that is consistent with other parts of the system.
A new test to show the interaction between the pattern [^a-z] (which matches '/') and a slash in a path has been added. The pattern should not match the slash with "pathmatch", but should with "wildmatch".
The 'diff-highlight' program (in contrib/) has been restructured for easier reuse by an external project 'diff-so-fancy'.
A common pattern to free a piece of memory and assign NULL to the pointer that used to point at it has been replaced with a new FREE_AND_NULL() macro.
Traditionally, the default die() routine had a code to prevent it from getting called multiple times, which interacted badly when a threaded program used it (one downside is that the real error may be hidden and instead the only error message given to the user may end up being "die recursion detected", which is not very useful).
Introduce a "repository" object to eventually make it easier to work in multiple repositories (the primary focus is to work with the superproject and its submodules) in a single process.
Optimize "what are the object names already taken in an alternate object database?" query that is used to derive the length of prefix an object name is uniquely abbreviated to.
The hashmap API has been updated so that data to customize the behaviour of the comparison function can be specified at the time a hashmap is initialized.
The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13 is now integrated into git.git as a submodule (the first submodule to ship with git.git). Clone git.git with --recurse-submodules to get it. For now a non-submodule copy of the same code is also shipped as part of the tree.
A recent update made it easier to use "-fsanitize=" option while compiling but supported only one sanitize option. Allow more than one to be combined, joined with a comma, like "make SANITIZE=foo,bar".
Use "p4 -G" to make "p4 changes" output more Python-friendly to parse.
We started using "%" PRItime, imitating "%" PRIuMAX and friends, as a way to format the internal timestamp value, but this does not play well with gettext(1) i18n framework, and causes "make pot" that is run by the l10n coordinator to create a broken po/git.pot file. This is a possible workaround for that problem.
It turns out that Cygwin also needs the fopen() wrapper that returns failure when a directory is opened for reading.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes since v2.13:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.13 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).
"git gc" did not interact well with "git worktree"-managed per-worktree refs.
"git cherry-pick" and other uses of the sequencer machinery mishandled a trailer block whose last line is an incomplete line. This has been fixed so that an additional sign-off etc. are added after completing the existing incomplete line.
The codepath in "git am" that is used when running "git rebase" leaked memory held for the log message of the commits being rebased.
"git clone --config var=val" is a way to populate the per-repository configuration file of the new repository, but it did not work well when val is an empty string. This has been fixed.
Setting "log.decorate=false" in the configuration file did not take effect in v2.13, which has been corrected.
A few codepaths in "checkout" and "am" working on an unborn branch tried to access an uninitialized piece of memory.
The Web interface to gmane news archive is long gone, even though the articles are still accessible via NTTP. Replace the links with ones to public-inbox.org. Because their message identification is based on the actual message-id, it is likely that it will be easier to migrate away from it if/when necessary.
The receive-pack program now makes sure that the push certificate records the same set of push options used for pushing.
Tests have been updated to pass under GETTEXT_POISON (a mechanism to ensure that output strings that should not be translated are not translated by mistake), and TravisCI is told to run them.
"git checkout --recurse-submodules" did not quite work with a submodule that itself has submodules.
"pack-objects" can stream a slice of an existing packfile out when the pack bitmap can tell that the reachable objects are all needed in the output, without inspecting individual objects. This strategy however would not work well when "--local" and other options are in use, and need to be disabled.
Fix memory leaks pointed out by Coverity (and people).
"git read-tree -m" (no tree-ish) gave a nonsense suggestion "use --empty if you want to clear the index". With "-m", such a request will still fail anyway, as you'd need to name at least one tree-ish to be merged.
Make sure our tests would pass when the sources are checked out with "platform native" line ending convention by default on Windows. Some "text" files out tests use and the test scripts themselves that are meant to be run with /bin/sh, ought to be checked out with eol=LF even on Windows.
Introduce the BUG() macro to improve die("BUG: ...").
Clarify documentation for include.path and includeIf..path configuration variables.
Git sometimes gives an advice in a rhetorical question that does not require an answer, which can confuse new users and non native speakers. Attempt to rephrase them.
A few http:// links that are redirected to https:// in the documentation have been updated to https:// links.
"git for-each-ref --format=..." with %(HEAD) in the format used to resolve the HEAD symref as many times as it had processed refs, which was wasteful, and "git branch" shared the same problem.
Regression fix to topic recently merged to 'master'.
The shell completion script (in contrib/) learned "git stash" has a new "push" subcommand.
"git interpret-trailers", when used as GIT_EDITOR for "git commit -v", looked for and appended to a trailer block at the very end, i.e. at the end of the "diff" output. The command has been corrected to pay attention to the cut-mark line "commit -v" adds to the buffer---the real trailer block should appear just before it.
A test allowed both "git push" and "git receive-pack" on the other end write their traces into the same file. This is OK on platforms that allows atomically appending to a file opened with O_APPEND, but on other platforms led to a mangled output, causing intermittent test failures. This has been fixed by disabling traces from "receive-pack" in the test.
Tag objects, which are not reachable from any ref, that point at missing objects were mishandled by "git gc" and friends (they should silently be ignored instead)
"git describe --contains" penalized light-weight tags so much that they were almost never considered. Instead, give them about the same chance to be considered as an annotated tag that is the same age as the underlying commit would.
The "run-command" API implementation has been made more robust against dead-locking in a threaded environment.
A recent update to t5545-push-options.sh started skipping all the tests in the script when a web server testing is disabled or unavailable, not just the ones that require a web server. Non HTTP tests have been salvaged to always run in this script.
"git send-email" now uses Net::SMTP::SSL, which is obsolete, only when needed. Recent versions of Net::SMTP can do TLS natively.
"foobarbaz" in "git fetch foobarbaz", even though there is no slashes in it, cannot be a nickname for a remote on Windows, as that is likely to be a pathname on a local filesystem.
"git clean -d" used to clean directories that has ignored files, even though the command should not lose ignored ones without "-x". "git status --ignored" did not list ignored and untracked files without "-uall". These have been corrected.
The result from "git diff" that compares two blobs, e.g. "git diff $commit1:$path $commit2:$path", used to be shown with the full object name as given on the command line, but it is more natural to use the $path in the output and use it to look up .gitattributes.
The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13 was quite broken on some big-endian platforms and/or platforms that do not like unaligned fetches. Update to the upstream code which has already fixed these issues.
"git am -h" triggered a BUG().
The interaction of "url.*.insteadOf" and custom URL scheme's whitelisting is now documented better.
The timestamp of the index file is now taken after the file is closed, to help Windows, on which a stale timestamp is reported by fstat() on a file that is opened for writing and data was written but not yet closed.
"git pull --rebase --autostash" didn't auto-stash when the local history fast-forwards to the upstream.
A flaky test has been corrected.
"git $cmd -h" for builtin commands calls the implementation of the command (i.e. cmd_$cmd() function) without doing any repository set-up, and the commands that expect RUN_SETUP is done by the Git potty needs to be prepared to show the help text without barfing. (merge d691551192 jk/consistent-h later to maint).
Help contributors that visit us at GitHub.
"git stash push " did not work from a subdirectory at all. Bugfix for a topic in v2.13
As there is no portable way to pass timezone information to strftime, some output format from "git log" and friends are impossible to produce. Teach our own strbuf_addftime to replace %z and %Z with caller-supplied values to help working around this. (merge 6eced3ec5e rs/strbuf-addftime-zZ later to maint).
"git mergetool" learned to work around a wrapper MacOS X adds around underlying meld.
An example in documentation that does not work in multi worktree configuration has been corrected.
The pretty-format specifiers like '%h', '%t', etc. had an optimization that no longer works correctly. In preparation/hope of getting it correctly implemented, first discard the optimization that is broken.
The code to pick up and execute command alias definition from the configuration used to switch to the top of the working tree and then come back when the expanded alias was executed, which was unnecessarilyl complex. Attempt to simplify the logic by using the early-config mechanism that does not chdir around.
Fix configuration codepath to pay proper attention to commondir that is used in multi-worktree situation, and isolate config API into its own header file. (merge dc8441fdb4 bw/config-h later to maint).
"git add -p" were updated in 2.12 timeframe to cope with custom core.commentchar but the implementation was buggy and a metacharacter like $ and * did not work.
A recent regression in "git rebase -i" has been fixed and tests that would have caught it and others have been added.
An unaligned 32-bit access in pack-bitmap code has been corrected.
Tighten error checks for invalid "git apply" input.
The split index code did not honor core.sharedRepository setting correctly.
The Makefile rule in contrib/subtree for building documentation learned to honour USE_ASCIIDOCTOR just like the main documentation set does.
Code clean-up to fix possible buffer over-reading.
A few tests that tried to verify the contents of push certificates did not use 'git rev-parse' to formulate the line to look for in the certificate correctly.
Update the character width tables.
After "git branch --move" of the currently checked out branch, the code to walk the reflog of HEAD via "log -g" and friends incorrectly stopped at the reflog entry that records the renaming of the branch.
The rewrite of "git branch --list" using for-each-ref's internals that happened in v2.13 regressed its handling of color.branch.local; this has been fixed.
The build procedure has been improved to allow building and testing Git with address sanitizer more easily. (merge 425ca6710b jk/build-with-asan later to maint).
On Cygwin, similar to Windows, "git push //server/share/repository" ought to mean a repository on a network share that can be accessed locally, but this did not work correctly due to stripping the double slashes at the beginning.
The progress meter did not give a useful output when we haven't had 0.5 seconds to measure the throughput during the interval. Instead show the overall throughput rate at the end, which is a much more useful number.
Code clean-up, that makes us in sync with Debian by one patch.
We run an early part of "git gc" that deals with refs before daemonising (and not under lock) even when running a background auto-gc, which caused multiple gc processes attempting to run the early part at the same time. This is now prevented by running the early part also under the GC lock.
A recent update broke an alias that contained an uppercase letter.
* Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.

New in Git 2.14.0 RC 0 (Jul 14, 2017)

UPDATES SINCE V2.13:
UI, Workflows & Features:
The colors in which "git status --short --branch" showed the names of the current branch and its remote-tracking branch are now configurable.
"git clone" learned the "--no-tags" option not to fetch all tags initially, and also set up the tagopt not to follow any tags in subsequent fetches.
"git archive --format=zip" learned to use zip64 extension when necessary to go beyond the 4GB limit.
"git reset" learned "--recurse-submodules" option.
"git diff --submodule=diff" now recurses into nested submodules.
"git repack" learned to accept the --threads= option and pass it to pack-objects.
"git send-email" learned to run sendemail-validate hook to inspect and reject a message before sending it out.
There is no good reason why "git fetch $there $sha1" should fail when the $sha1 names an object at the tip of an advertised ref, even when the other side hasn't enabled allowTipSHA1InWant.
The recently introduced "[includeIf "gitdir:$dir"] path=..." mechanism has further been taught to take symlinks into account. The directory "$dir" specified in "gitdir:$dir" may be a symlink to a real location, not something that $(getcwd) may return. In such a case, a realpath of "$dir" is compared with the real path of the current repository to determine if the contents from the named path should be included.
Make the "indent" heuristics the default in "diff" and diff.indentHeuristics configuration variable an escape hatch for those who do no want it.
Many commands learned to pay attention to submodule.recurse configuration.
The convention for a command line is to follow "git cmdname --options" with revisions followed by an optional "--" disambiguator and then finally pathspecs. When "--" is not there, we make sure early ones are all interpretable as revs (and do not look like paths) and later ones are the other way around. A pathspec with "magic" (e.g. ":/p/a/t/h" that matches p/a/t/h from the top-level of the working tree, no matter what subdirectory you are working from) are conservatively judged as "not a path", which required disambiguation more often. The command line parser learned to say "it's a pathspec" a bit more often when the syntax looks like so.
Update "perl-compatible regular expression" support to enable JIT and also allow linking with the newer PCRE v2 library.
"filter-branch" learned a pseudo filter "--setup" that can be used to define common functions/variables that can be used by other filters.
Using "git add d/i/r" when d/i/r is the top of the working tree of a separate repository would create a gitlink in the index, which would appear as a not-quite-initialized submodule to others. We learned to give warnings when this happens.
"git status" learned to optionally give how many stash entries the user has in its output.
"git status" has long shown essentially the same message as "git commit"; the message it gives while preparing for the root commit, i.e. "Initial commit", was hard to understand for some new users. Now it says "No commits yet" to stress more on the current status (rather than the commit the user is preparing for, which is more in line with the focus of "git commit").
"git send-email" learned to overcome some SMTP server limitation that does not allow many pieces of e-mails to be sent over a single session.
An old message shown in the commit log template was removed, as it has outlived its usefulness.
"git pull --rebase --recurse-submodules" learns to rebase the branch in the submodules to an updated base.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.:
The default packed-git limit value has been raised on larger platforms to save "git fetch" from a (recoverable) failure while "gc" is running in parallel.
Code to update the cache-tree has been tightened so that we won't accidentally write out any 0{40} entry in the tree object.
Attempt to allow us notice "fishy" situation where we fail to remove the temporary directory used during the test.
Travis CI gained a task to format the documentation with both AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor.
Some platforms have ulong that is smaller than time_t, and our historical use of ulong for timestamp would mean they cannot represent some timestamp that the platform allows. Invent a separate and dedicated timestamp_t (so that we can distingiuish timestamps and a vanilla ulongs, which along is already a good move), and then declare uintmax_t is the type to be used as the timestamp_t.
We can trigger Windows auto-build tester (credits: Dscho & Microsoft) from our existing Travis CI tester now.
Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
Simplify parse_pathspec() codepath and stop it from looking at the default in-core index.
Add perf-test for wildmatch.
Code from "conversion using external process" codepath has been extracted to a separate sub-process.[ch] module.
When "git checkout", "git merge", etc. manipulates the in-core index, various pieces of information in the index extensions are discarded from the original state, as it is usually not the case that they are kept up-to-date and in-sync with the operation on the main index. The untracked cache extension is copied across these operations now, which would speed up "git status" (as long as the cache is properly invalidated).
The internal implementation of "git grep" has seen some clean-up.
Update the C style recommendation for notes for translators, as recent versions of gettext tools can work with our style of multi-line comments.
The implementation of "ref" API around the "packed refs" have been cleaned up, in preparation for further changes.
The internal logic used in "git blame" has been libified to make it easier to use by cgit.
Our code often opens a path to an optional file, to work on its contents when we can successfully open it. We can ignore a failure to open if such an optional file does not exist, but we do want to report a failure in opening for other reasons (e.g. we got an I/O error, or the file is there, but we lack the permission to open).
The exact errors we need to ignore are ENOENT (obviously) and ENOTDIR (less obvious). Instead of repeating comparison of errno with these two constants, introduce a helper function to do so.
We often try to open a file for reading whose existence is optional, and silently ignore errors from open/fopen; report such errors if they are not due to missing files.
When an existing repository is used for t/perf testing, we first create bit-for-bit copy of it, which may grab a transient state of the repository and freeze it into the repository used for testing, which then may cause Git operations to fail. Single out "the index being locked" case and forcibly drop the lock from the copy.
Three instances of the same helper function have been consolidated to one.
"fast-import" uses a default pack chain depth that is consistent with other parts of the system.
A new test to show the interaction between the pattern [^a-z] (which matches '/') and a slash in a path has been added. The pattern should not match the slash with "pathmatch", but should with "wildmatch".
The 'diff-highlight' program (in contrib/) has been restructured for easier reuse by an external project 'diff-so-fancy'.
A common pattern to free a piece of memory and assign NULL to the pointer that used to point at it has been replaced with a new FREE_AND_NULL() macro.
Traditionally, the default die() routine had a code to prevent it from getting called multiple times, which interacted badly when a threaded program used it (one downside is that the real error may be hidden and instead the only error message given to the user may end up being "die recursion detected", which is not very useful).
Introduce a "repository" object to eventually make it easier to work in multiple repositories (the primary focus is to work with the superproject and its submodules) in a single process.
Optimize "what are the object names already taken in an alternate object database?" query that is used to derive the length of prefix an object name is uniquely abbreviated to.
The hashmap API has been updated so that data to customize the behaviour of the comparison function can be specified at the time a hashmap is initialized.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.13:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.13 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).
"git gc" did not interact well with "git worktree"-managed per-worktree refs.
"git cherry-pick" and other uses of the sequencer machinery mishandled a trailer block whose last line is an incomplete line. This has been fixed so that an additional sign-off etc. are added after completing the existing incomplete line.
The codepath in "git am" that is used when running "git rebase" leaked memory held for the log message of the commits being rebased.
"git clone --config var=val" is a way to populate the per-repository configuration file of the new repository, but it did not work well when val is an empty string. This has been fixed.
Setting "log.decorate=false" in the configuration file did not take effect in v2.13, which has been corrected.
A few codepaths in "checkout" and "am" working on an unborn branch tried to access an uninitialized piece of memory.
The Web interface to gmane news archive is long gone, even though the articles are still accessible via NTTP. Replace the links with ones to public-inbox.org. Because their message identification is based on the actual message-id, it is likely that it will be easier to migrate away from it if/when necessary.
The receive-pack program now makes sure that the push certificate records the same set of push options used for pushing.
Tests have been updated to pass under GETTEXT_POISON (a mechanism to ensure that output strings that should not be translated are not translated by mistake), and TravisCI is told to run them.
"git checkout --recurse-submodules" did not quite work with a submodule that itself has submodules.
"pack-objects" can stream a slice of an existing packfile out when the pack bitmap can tell that the reachable objects are all needed in the output, without inspecting individual objects. This strategy however would not work well when "--local" and other options are in use, and need to be disabled.
Fix memory leaks pointed out by Coverity (and people).
"git read-tree -m" (no tree-ish) gave a nonsense suggestion "use --empty if you want to clear the index". With "-m", such a request will still fail anyway, as you'd need to name at least one tree-ish to be merged.
Make sure our tests would pass when the sources are checked out with "platform native" line ending convention by default on Windows. Some "text" files out tests use and the test scripts themselves that are meant to be run with /bin/sh, ought to be checked out with eol=LF even on Windows.
Introduce the BUG() macro to improve die("BUG: ...").
Clarify documentation for include.path and includeIf..path configuration variables.
Git sometimes gives an advice in a rhetorical question that does not require an answer, which can confuse new users and non native speakers. Attempt to rephrase them.
A few http:// links that are redirected to https:// in the documentation have been updated to https:// links.
"git for-each-ref --format=..." with %(HEAD) in the format used to resolve the HEAD symref as many times as it had processed refs, which was wasteful, and "git branch" shared the same problem.
Regression fix to topic recently merged to 'master'.
The shell completion script (in contrib/) learned "git stash" has a new "push" subcommand.
"git interpret-trailers", when used as GIT_EDITOR for "git commit -v", looked for and appended to a trailer block at the very end, i.e. at the end of the "diff" output. The command has been corrected to pay attention to the cut-mark line "commit -v" adds to the buffer---the real trailer block should appear just before it.
A test allowed both "git push" and "git receive-pack" on the other end write their traces into the same file. This is OK on platforms that allows atomically appending to a file opened with O_APPEND, but on other platforms led to a mangled output, causing intermittent test failures. This has been fixed by disabling traces from "receive-pack" in the test.
Tag objects, which are not reachable from any ref, that point at missing objects were mishandled by "git gc" and friends (they should silently be ignored instead)
"git describe --contains" penalized light-weight tags so much that they were almost never considered. Instead, give them about the same chance to be considered as an annotated tag that is the same age as the underlying commit would.
The "run-command" API implementation has been made more robust against dead-locking in a threaded environment.
A recent update to t5545-push-options.sh started skipping all the tests in the script when a web server testing is disabled or unavailable, not just the ones that require a web server. Non HTTP tests have been salvaged to always run in this script.
"git send-email" now uses Net::SMTP::SSL, which is obsolete, only when needed. Recent versions of Net::SMTP can do TLS natively.
"foobarbaz" in "git fetch foobarbaz", even though there is no slashes in it, cannot be a nickname for a remote on Windows, as that is likely to be a pathname on a local filesystem.
"git clean -d" used to clean directories that has ignored files, even though the command should not lose ignored ones without "-x". "git status --ignored" did not list ignored and untracked files without "-uall". These have been corrected.
The result from "git diff" that compares two blobs, e.g. "git diff $commit1:$path $commit2:$path", used to be shown with the full object name as given on the command line, but it is more natural to use the $path in the output and use it to look up .gitattributes.
The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13 was quite broken on some big-endian platforms and/or platforms that do not like unaligned fetches. Update to the upstream code which has already fixed these issues.
"git am -h" triggered a BUG().
The interaction of "url.*.insteadOf" and custom URL scheme's whitelisting is now documented better.
The timestamp of the index file is now taken after the file is closed, to help Windows, on which a stale timestamp is reported by fstat() on a file that is opened for writing and data was written but not yet closed.
"git pull --rebase --autostash" didn't auto-stash when the local history fast-forwards to the upstream.
A flaky test has been corrected.
"git $cmd -h" for builtin commands calls the implementation of the command (i.e. cmd_$cmd() function) without doing any repository set-up, and the commands that expect RUN_SETUP is done by the Git potty needs to be prepared to show the help text without barfing. (merge d691551192 jk/consistent-h later to maint).
Help contributors that visit us at GitHub.
"git stash push " did not work from a subdirectory at all. Bugfix for a topic in v2.13
As there is no portable way to pass timezone information to strftime, some output format from "git log" and friends are impossible to produce. Teach our own strbuf_addftime to replace %z and %Z with caller-supplied values to help working around this. (merge 6eced3ec5e rs/strbuf-addftime-zZ later to maint).
"git mergetool" learned to work around a wrapper MacOS X adds around underlying meld.
An example in documentation that does not work in multi worktree configuration has been corrected.
The pretty-format specifiers like '%h', '%t', etc. had an optimization that no longer works correctly. In preparation/hope of getting it correctly implemented, first discard the optimization that is broken.
The code to pick up and execute command alias definition from the configuration used to switch to the top of the working tree and then come back when the expanded alias was executed, which was unnecessarilyl complex. Attempt to simplify the logic by using the early-config mechanism that does not chdir around.
Fix configuration codepath to pay proper attention to commondir that is used in multi-worktree situation, and isolate config API into its own header file. (merge dc8441fdb4 bw/config-h later to maint).
"git add -p" were updated in 2.12 timeframe to cope with custom core.commentchar but the implementation was buggy and a metacharacter like $ and * did not work.
A recent regression in "git rebase -i" has been fixed and tests that would have caught it and others have been added.
An unaligned 32-bit access in pack-bitmap code ahs been corrected.
Tighten error checks for invalid "git apply" input.
The split index code did not honor core.sharedrepository setting correctly.
The Makefile rule in contrib/subtree for building documentation learned to honour USE_ASCIIDOCTOR just like the main documentation set does.
Update the sha1dc again to fix portability glitches.
Code clean-up to fix possible buffer over-reading. (merge 2d105451c0 rs/apply-avoid-over-reading later to maint).
A few tests that tried to verify the contents of push certificates did not use 'git rev-parse' to formulate the line to look for in the certificate correctly.
Update the character width tables. (merge 7560aacd7c bb/unicode-10.0 later to maint).
After "git branch --move" of the currently checked out branch, the code to walk the reflog of HEAD via "log -g" and friends incorrectly stopped at the reflog entry that records the renaming of the branch.
The rewrite of "git branch --list" using for-each-ref's internals that happened in v2.13 regressed its handling of color.branch.local; this has been fixed.
The build procedure has been improved to allow building and testing Git with address sanitizer more easily. (merge 566cf0b3bd jk/build-with-asan later to maint).
Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.

New in Git 2.13.3 (Jul 13, 2017)

Fixes:
The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13.2 was still broken on some platforms. Update to the upstream code again to take their fix.
The 'diff-highlight' program (in contrib/) has been restructured for easier reuse by an external project 'diff-so-fancy'.
"git mergetool" learned to work around a wrapper MacOS X adds around underlying meld.
An example in documentation that does not work in multi worktree configuration has been corrected.
The pretty-format specifiers like '%h', '%t', etc. had an optimization that no longer works correctly. In preparation/hope of getting it correctly implemented, first discard the optimization that is broken.
The code to pick up and execute command alias definition from the configuration used to switch to the top of the working tree and then come back when the expanded alias was executed, which was unnecessarilyl complex. Attempt to simplify the logic by using the early-config mechanism that does not chdir around.
"git add -p" were updated in 2.12 timeframe to cope with custom core.commentchar but the implementation was buggy and a metacharacter like $ and * did not work.
Fix a recent regression to "git rebase -i" and add tests that would have caught it and others.
An unaligned 32-bit access in pack-bitmap code ahs been corrected.
Tighten error checks for invalid "git apply" input.
The split index code did not honor core.sharedrepository setting correctly.
The Makefile rule in contrib/subtree for building documentation learned to honour USE_ASCIIDOCTOR just like the main documentation set does.
A few tests that tried to verify the contents of push certificates did not use 'git rev-parse' to formulate the line to look for in the certificate correctly.
After "git branch --move" of the currently checked out branch, the code to walk the reflog of HEAD via "log -g" and friends incorrectly stopped at the reflog entry that records the renaming of the branch.
The rewrite of "git branch --list" using for-each-ref's internals that happened in v2.13 regressed its handling of color.branch.local; this has been fixed.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.13.2 (Jun 26, 2017)

New in Git 2.13.1 (Jun 6, 2017)

Fixes since v2.13:
The Web interface to gmane news archive is long gone, even though the articles are still accessible via NTTP. Replace the links with ones to public-inbox.org. Because their message identification is based on the actual message-id, it is likely that it will be easier to migrate away from it if/when necessary.
Update tests to pass under GETTEXT_POISON (a mechanism to ensure that output strings that should not be translated are not translated by mistake), and tell TravisCI to run them.
Setting "log.decorate=false" in the configuration file did not take effect in v2.13, which has been corrected.
An earlier update to test 7400 needed to be skipped on CYGWIN.
Git sometimes gives an advice in a rhetorical question that does not require an answer, which can confuse new users and non native speakers. Attempt to rephrase them.
"git read-tree -m" (no tree-ish) gave a nonsense suggestion "use --empty if you want to clear the index". With "-m", such a request will still fail anyway, as you'd need to name at least one tree-ish to be merged.
The codepath in "git am" that is used when running "git rebase" leaked memory held for the log message of the commits being rebased.
"pack-objects" can stream a slice of an existing packfile out when the pack bitmap can tell that the reachable objects are all needed in the output, without inspecting individual objects. This strategy however would not work well when "--local" and other options are in use, and need to be disabled.
Clarify documentation for include.path and includeIf..path configuration variables.
Tag objects, which are not reachable from any ref, that point at missing objects were mishandled by "git gc" and friends (they should silently be ignored instead)
A few http:// links that are redirected to https:// in the documentation have been updated to https:// links.
Make sure our tests would pass when the sources are checked out with "platform native" line ending convention by default on Windows. Some "text" files out tests use and the test scripts themselves that are meant to be run with /bin/sh, ought to be checked out with eol=LF even on Windows.
Fix memory leaks pointed out by Coverity (and people).
The receive-pack program now makes sure that the push certificate records the same set of push options used for pushing.
"git cherry-pick" and other uses of the sequencer machinery mishandled a trailer block whose last line is an incomplete line. This has been fixed so that an additional sign-off etc. are added after completing the existing incomplete line.
The shell completion script (in contrib/) learned "git stash" has a new "push" subcommand.
Travis CI gained a task to format the documentation with both AsciiDoc and AsciiDoctor.
Update the C style recommendation for notes for translators, as recent versions of gettext tools can work with our style of multi-line comments.
"git clone --config var=val" is a way to populate the per-repository configuration file of the new repository, but it did not work well when val is an empty string. This has been fixed.
A few codepaths in "checkout" and "am" working on an unborn branch tried to access an uninitialized piece of memory.
"git for-each-ref --format=..." with %(HEAD) in the format used to resolve the HEAD symref as many times as it had processed refs, which was wasteful, and "git branch" shared the same problem.
"git interpret-trailers", when used as GIT_EDITOR for "git commit -v", looked for and appended to a trailer block at the very end, i.e. at the end of the "diff" output. The command has been corrected to pay attention to the cut-mark line "commit -v" adds to the buffer---the real trailer block should appear just before it.
A test allowed both "git push" and "git receive-pack" on the other end write their traces into the same file. This is OK on platforms that allows atomically appending to a file opened with O_APPEND, but on other platforms led to a mangled output, causing intermittent test failures. This has been fixed by disabling traces from "receive-pack" in the test.
"foobarbaz" in "git fetch foobarbaz", even though there is no slashes in it, cannot be a nickname for a remote on Windows, as that is likely to be a pathname on a local filesystem.
The "collision detecting" SHA-1 implementation shipped with 2.13 was quite broken on some big-endian platforms and/or platforms that do not like unaligned fetches. Update to the upstream code which has already fixed these issues.
"git am -h" triggered a BUG().
The interaction of "url.*.insteadOf" and custom URL scheme's whitelisting is now documented better.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.13.0 (May 10, 2017)

UI, Workflows & Features:
"git describe" and "git name-rev" have been taught to take more than one refname patterns to restrict the set of refs to base their naming output on, and also learned to take negative patterns to name refs not to be used for naming via their "--exclude" option.
Deletion of a branch "foo/bar" could remove .git/refs/heads/foo once there no longer is any other branch whose name begins with "foo/", but we didn't do so so far. Now we do.
When "git merge" detects a path that is renamed in one history while the other history deleted (or modified) it, it now reports both paths to help the user understand what is going on in the two histories being merged.
The part in "http.." configuration variable can now be spelled with '*' that serves as wildcard. E.g. "http.https://*.example.com.proxy" can be used to specify the proxy used for https://a.example.com, https://b.example.com, etc., i.e. any host in the example.com domain.
"git tag" did not leave useful message when adding a new entry to reflog; this was left unnoticed for a long time because refs/tags/* doesn't keep reflog by default.
The "negative" pathspec feature was somewhat more cumbersome to use than necessary in that its short-hand used "!" which needed to be escaped from shells, and it required "exclude from what?" specified.
The command line options for ssh invocation needs to be tweaked for some implementations of SSH (e.g. PuTTY plink wants "-P " while OpenSSH wants "-p " to specify port to connect to), and the variant was guessed when GIT_SSH environment variable is used to specify it. The logic to guess now applies to the command specified by the newer GIT_SSH_COMMAND and also core.sshcommand configuration variable, and comes with an escape hatch for users to deal with misdetected cases.
The "--git-path", "--git-common-dir", and "--shared-index-path" options of "git rev-parse" did not produce usable output. They are now updated to show the path to the correct file, relative to where the caller is.
"git diff -W" has been taught to handle the case where a new function is added at the end of the file better.
"git update-ref -d" and other operations to delete references did not leave any entry in HEAD's reflog when the reference being deleted was the current branch. This is not a problem in practice because you do not want to delete the branch you are currently on, but caused renaming of the current branch to something else not to be logged in a useful way.
"Cc:" on the trailer part does not have to conform to RFC strictly, unlike in the e-mail header. "git send-email" has been updated to ignore anything after '>' when picking addresses, to allow non-address cruft like " # stable 4.4" after the address.
When "git submodule init" decides that the submodule in the working tree is its upstream, it now gives a warning as it is not a very common setup.
"git stash push" takes a pathspec so that the local changes can be stashed away only partially.
Documentation for "git ls-files" did not refer to core.quotePath.
The experimental "split index" feature has gained a few configuration variables to make it easier to use.
From a working tree of a repository, a new option of "rev-parse" lets you ask if the repository is used as a submodule of another project, and where the root level of the working tree of that project (i.e. your superproject) is.
The pathspec mechanism learned to further limit the paths that match the pattern to those that have specified attributes attached via the gitattributes mechanism.
Our source code has used the SHA1_HEADER cpp macro after "#include" in the C code to switch among the SHA-1 implementations. Instead, list the exact header file names and switch among implementations using "#ifdef BLK_SHA1/#include "block-sha1/sha1.h"/.../#endif"; this helps some IDE tools.
The start-up sequence of "git" needs to figure out some configured settings before it finds and set itself up in the location of the repository and was quite messy due to its "chicken-and-egg" nature. The code has been restructured.
The command line prompt (in contrib/) learned a new 'tag' style that can be specified with GIT_PS1_DESCRIBE_STYLE, to describe a detached HEAD with "git describe --tags".
The configuration file learned a new "includeIf..path" that includes the contents of the given path only when the condition holds. This allows you to say "include this work-related bit only in the repositories under my ~/work/ directory".
Recent update to "rebase -i" started showing a message that is not a warning with "warning:" prefix by mistake. This has been fixed.
Recently we started passing the "--push-options" through the external remote helper interface; now the "smart HTTP" remote helper understands what to do with the passed information.
"git describe --dirty" dies when it cannot be determined if the state in the working tree matches that of HEAD (e.g. broken repository or broken submodule). The command learned a new option "git describe --broken" to give "$name-broken" (where $name is the description of HEAD) in such a case.
"git checkout" is taught the "--recurse-submodules" option.
Recent enhancement to "git stash push" command to support pathspec to allow only a subset of working tree changes to be stashed away was found to be too chatty and exposed the internal implementation detail (e.g. when it uses reset to match the index to HEAD before doing other things, output from reset seeped out). These, and other chattyness has been fixed.
"git merge HEAD " syntax that has been deprecated since October 2007 has been removed.
The refs completion for large number of refs has been sped up, partly by giving up disambiguating ambiguous refs and partly by eliminating most of the shell processing between 'git for-each-ref' and 'ls-remote' and Bash's completion facility.
On many keyboards, typing "@{" involves holding down SHIFT key and one can easily end up with "@{Up..." when typing "@{upstream}". As the upstream/push keywords do not appear anywhere else in the syntax, we can safely accept them case insensitively without introducing ambiguity or confusion to solve this.
"git tag/branch/for-each-ref" family of commands long allowed to filter the refs by "--contains X" (show only the refs that are descendants of X), "--merged X" (show only the refs that are ancestors of X), "--no-merged X" (show only the refs that are not ancestors of X). One curious omission, "--no-contains X" (show only the refs that are not descendants of X) has been added to them.
The default behaviour of "git log" in an interactive session has been changed to enable "--decorate".
The output from "git status --short" has been extended to show various kinds of dirtyness in submodules differently; instead of to "M" for modified, 'm' and '?' can be shown to signal changes only to the working tree of the submodule but not the commit that is checked out.
Allow the http.postbuffer configuration variable to be set to a size that can be expressed in size_t, which can be larger than ulong on some platforms.
"git rebase" learns "--signoff" option.
The completion script (in contrib/) learned to complete "git push --delete b" to complete branch name to be deleted.
"git worktree add --lock" allows to lock a worktree immediately after it's created. This helps prevent a race between "git worktree add; git worktree lock" and "git worktree prune".
Completion for "git checkout " that auto-creates the branch out of a remote tracking branch can now be disabled, as this completion often gets in the way when completing to checkout an existing local branch that happens to share the same prefix with bunch of remote tracking branches.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support, etc:
The code to list branches in "git branch" has been consolidated with the more generic ref-filter API.
Resource usage while enumerating refs from alternate object store has been optimized to help receiving end of "push" that hosts a repository with many "forks".
The gitattributes machinery is being taught to work better in a multi-threaded environment.
"git rebase -i" starts using the recently updated "sequencer" code.
Code and design clean-up for the refs API.
The preload-index code has been taught not to bother with the index entries that are paths that are not checked out by "sparse checkout".
Some warning() messages from "git clean" were updated to show the errno from failed system calls.
The "parse_config_key()" API function has been cleaned up.
A test that creates a confusing branch whose name is HEAD has been corrected not to do so.
The code that parses header fields in the commit object has been updated for (micro)performance and code hygiene.
An helper function to make it easier to append the result from real_path() to a strbuf has been added.
Reduce authentication round-trip over HTTP when the server supports just a single authentication method. This also improves the behaviour when Git is misconfigured to enable http.emptyAuth against a server that does not authenticate without a username (i.e. not using Kerberos etc., which makes http.emptyAuth pointless).
Windows port wants to use OpenSSL's implementation of SHA-1 routines, so let them.
The t/perf performance test suite was not prepared to test not so old versions of Git, but now it covers versions of Git that are not so ancient.
Add 32-bit Linux variant to the set of platforms to be tested with Travis CI.
"git branch --list" takes the "--abbrev" and "--no-abbrev" options to control the output of the object name in its "-v"(erbose) output, but a recent update started ignoring them; fix it before the breakage reaches to any released version.
Picking two versions of Git and running tests to make sure the older one and the newer one interoperate happily has now become possible.
"git tag --contains" used to (ab)use the object bits to keep track of the state of object reachability without clearing them after use; this has been cleaned up and made to use the newer commit-slab facility.
The "debug" helper used in the test framework learned to run a command under "gdb" interactively.
The "detect attempt to create collisions" variant of SHA-1 implementation by Marc Stevens (CWI) and Dan Shumow (Microsoft) has been integrated and made the default.
The test framework learned to detect unterminated here documents.
The name-hash used for detecting paths that are different only in cases (which matter on case insensitive filesystems) has been optimized to take advantage of multi-threading when it makes sense.
An earlier version of sha1dc/sha1.c that was merged to 'master' compiled incorrectly on Windows, which has been fixed.
"what URL do we want to update this submodule?" and "are we interested in this submodule?" are split into two distinct concepts, and then the way used to express the latter got extended, paving a way to make it easier to manage a project with many submodules and make it possible to later extend use of multiple worktrees for a project with submodules.
Some debugging output from "git describe" were marked for l10n, but some weren't. Mark missing ones for l10n.
Define a new task in .travis.yml that triggers a test session on Windows run elsewhere.
Conversion from uchar[20] to struct object_id continues.
The "submodule" specific field in the ref_store structure is replaced with a more generic "gitdir" that can later be used also when dealing with ref_store that represents the set of refs visible from the other worktrees.
The string-list API used a custom reallocation strategy that was very inefficient, instead of using the usual ALLOC_GROW() macro, which has been fixed. (merge 950a234cbd jh/string-list-micro-optim later to maint).
In a 2- and 3-way merge of trees, more than one source trees often end up sharing an identical subtree; optimize by not reading the same tree multiple times in such a case. (merge d12a8cf0af jh/unpack-trees-micro-optim later to maint).
The index file has a trailing SHA-1 checksum to detect file corruption, and historically we checked it every time the index file is used. Omit the validation during normal use, and instead verify only in "git fsck".
Having a git command on the upstream side of a pipe in a test script will hide the exit status from the command, which may cause us to fail to notice a breakage; rewrite tests in a script to avoid this issue.
Travis CI learns to run coccicheck.
"git checkout" that handles a lot of paths has been optimized by reducing the number of unnecessary checks of paths in the has_dir_name() function.
The internals of the refs API around the cached refs has been streamlined.
Output from perf tests have been updated to align their titles.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.12 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).
"git repack --depth=" for a long time busted the specified depth when reusing delta from existing packs. This has been corrected.
The code to parse the command line "git grep ... [[--] ...]" has been cleaned up, and a handful of bugs have been fixed (e.g. we used to check "--" if it is a rev).
"git ls-remote" and "git archive --remote" are designed to work without being in a directory under Git's control. However, recent updates revealed that we randomly look into a directory called .git/ without actually doing necessary set-up when working in a repository. Stop doing so.
"git show-branch" expected there were only very short branch names in the repository and used a fixed-length buffer to hold them without checking for overflow.
A caller of tempfile API that uses stdio interface to write to files may ignore errors while writing, which is detected when tempfile is closed (with a call to ferror()). By that time, the original errno that may have told us what went wrong is likely to be long gone and was overwritten by an irrelevant value. close_tempfile() now resets errno to EIO to make errno at least predictable.
"git remote rm X", when a branch has remote X configured as the value of its branch.*.remote, tried to remove branch.*.remote and branch.*.merge and failed if either is unset.
A "gc.log" file left by a backgrounded "gc --auto" disables further automatic gc; it has been taught to run at least once a day (by default) by ignoring a stale "gc.log" file that is too old.
The code to parse "git -c VAR=VAL cmd" and set configuration variable for the duration of cmd had two small bugs, which have been fixed.
user.email that consists of only cruft chars should consistently error out, but didn't.
"git upload-pack", which is a counter-part of "git fetch", did not report a request for a ref that was not advertised as invalid. This is generally not a problem (because "git fetch" will stop before making such a request), but is the right thing to do.
A leak in a codepath to read from a packed object in (rare) cases has been plugged.
When a redirected http transport gets an error during the redirected request, we ignored the error we got from the server, and ended up giving a not-so-useful error message.
The patch subcommand of "git add -i" was meant to have paths selection prompt just like other subcommand, unlike "git add -p" directly jumps to hunk selection. Recently, this was broken and "add -i" lost the paths selection dialog, but it now has been fixed.
Git v2.12 was shipped with an embarrassing breakage where various operations that verify paths given from the user stopped dying when seeing an issue, and instead later triggering segfault.
There is no need for Python only to give a few messages to the standard error stream, but we somehow did.
The code to parse "git log -L..." command line was buggy when there are many ranges specified with -L; overrun of the allocated buffer has been fixed.
The command-line parsing of "git log -L" copied internal data structures using incorrect size on ILP32 systems.
"git diff --quiet" relies on the size field in diff_filespec to be correctly populated, but diff_populate_filespec() helper function made an incorrect short-cut when asked only to populate the size field for paths that need to go through convert_to_git() (e.g. CRLF conversion).
A few tests were run conditionally under (rare) conditions where they cannot be run (like running cvs tests under 'root' account).
"git branch @" created refs/heads/@ as a branch, and in general the code that handled @{-1} and @{upstream} was a bit too loose in disambiguating.
"git fetch" that requests a commit by object name, when the other side does not allow such an request, failed without much explanation.
"git filter-branch --prune-empty" drops a single-parent commit that becomes a no-op, but did not drop a root commit whose tree is empty.
Recent versions of Git treats http alternates (used in dumb http transport) just like HTTP redirects and requires the client to enable following it, due to security concerns. But we forgot to give a warning when we decide not to honor the alternates.
"git push" had a handful of codepaths that could lead to a deadlock when unexpected error happened, which has been fixed.
"Dumb http" transport used to misparse a nonsense http-alternates response, which has been fixed.
"git add -p " unnecessarily expanded the pathspec to a list of individual files that matches the pathspec by running "git ls-files ", before feeding it to "git diff-index" to see which paths have changes, because historically the pathspec language supported by "diff-index" was weaker. These days they are equivalent and there is no reason to internally expand it. This helps both performance and avoids command line argument limit on some platforms. (merge 7288e12cce jk/add-i-use-pathspecs later to maint).
"git status --porcelain" is supposed to give a stable output, but a few strings were left as translatable by mistake.
"git revert -m 0 $merge_commit" complained that reverting a merge needs to say relative to which parent the reversion needs to happen, as if "-m 0" weren't given. The correct diagnosis is that "-m 0" does not refer to the first parent ("-m 1" does). This has been fixed.
Code to read submodule..ignore config did not state the variable name correctly when giving an error message diagnosing misconfiguration.
Fix for NO_PTHREADS build.
Fix for potential segv introduced in v2.11.0 and later (also v2.10.2) to "git log --pickaxe-regex -S".
A few unterminated here documents in tests were fixed, which in turn revealed incorrect expectations the tests make. These tests have been updated.
Fix for NO_PTHREADS option. (merge 2225e1ea20 bw/grep-recurse-submodules later to maint).
Git now avoids blindly falling back to ".git" when the setup sequence said we are _not_ in Git repository. A corner case that happens to work right now may be broken by a call to die("BUG"). (merge b1ef400eec jk/no-looking-at-dotgit-outside-repo-final later to maint).
A few commands that recently learned the "--recurse-submodule" option misbehaved when started from a subdirectory of the superproject. (merge b2dfeb7c00 bw/recurse-submodules-relative-fix later to maint).
FreeBSD implementation of getcwd(3) behaved differently when an intermediate directory is unreadable/unsearchable depending on the length of the buffer provided, which our strbuf_getcwd() was not aware of. strbuf_getcwd() has been taught to cope with it better. (merge a54e938e5b rs/freebsd-getcwd-workaround later to maint).
A recent update to "rebase -i" stopped running hooks for the "git commit" command during "reword" action, which has been fixed.
Removing an entry from a notes tree and then looking another note entry from the resulting tree using the internal notes API functions did not work as expected. No in-tree users of the API has such access pattern, but it still is worth fixing.
"git receive-pack" could have been forced to die by attempting allocate an unreasonably large amount of memory with a crafted push certificate; this has been fixed. (merge f2214dede9 bc/push-cert-receive-fix later to maint).
Update error handling for codepath that deals with corrupt loose objects. (merge 51054177b3 jk/loose-object-info-report-error later to maint).
"git diff --submodule=diff" learned to work better in a project with a submodule that in turn has its own submodules. (merge 17b254cda6 sb/show-diff-for-submodule-in-diff-fix later to maint).
Update the build dependency so that an update to /usr/bin/perl etc. result in recomputation of perl.mak file. (merge c59c4939c2 ab/regen-perl-mak-with-different-perl later to maint).
"git push --recurse-submodules --push-option=" learned to propagate the push option recursively down to pushes in submodules.
If a patch e-mail had its first paragraph after an in-body header indented (even after a blank line after the in-body header line), the indented line was mistook as a continuation of the in-body header. This has been fixed. (merge fd1062e52e lt/mailinfo-in-body-header-continuation later to maint).
Clean up fallouts from recent tightening of the set-up sequence, where Git barfs when repository information is accessed without first ensuring that it was started in a repository. (merge bccb22cbb1 jk/no-looking-at-dotgit-outside-repo later to maint).
"git p4" used "name-rev HEAD" when it wants to learn what branch is checked out; it should use "symbolic-ref HEAD". (merge eff451101d ld/p4-current-branch-fix later to maint).
"http.proxy" set to an empty string is used to disable the usage of proxy. We broke this early last year. (merge ae51d91105 sr/http-proxy-configuration-fix later to maint).
$GIT_DIR may in some cases be normalized with all symlinks resolved while "gitdir" path expansion in the pattern does not receive the same treatment, leading to incorrect mismatch. This has been fixed.
"git submodule" script does not work well with strange pathnames. Protect it from a path with slashes in them, at least.
"git fetch-pack" was not prepared to accept ERR packet that the upload-pack can send with a human-readable error message. It showed the packet contents with ERR prefix, so there was no data loss, but it was redundant to say "ERR" in an error message. (merge 8e2c7bef03 jt/fetch-pack-error-reporting later to maint).
"ls-files --recurse-submodules" did not quite work well in a project with nested submodules.
gethostname(2) may not NUL terminate the buffer if hostname does not fit; unfortunately there is no easy way to see if our buffer was too small, but at least this will make sure we will not end up using garbage past the end of the buffer. (merge 5781a9a270 dt/xgethostname-nul-termination later to maint).
A recent update broke "git add -p ../foo" from a subdirectory.
While handy, "git_path()" is a dangerous function to use as a callsite that uses it safely one day can be broken by changes to other code that calls it. Reduction of its use continues. (merge 16d2676c9e jk/war-on-git-path later to maint).
The split-index code configuration code used an unsafe git_path() function without copying its result out.
Many stale HTTP(s) links have been updated in our documentation. (merge 613416f0be jk/update-links-in-docs later to maint).
"git-shell" rejects a request to serve a repository whose name begins with a dash, which makes it no longer possible to get it confused into spawning service programs like "git-upload-pack" with an option like "--help", which in turn would spawn an interactive pager, instead of working with the repository user asked to access
(i.e. the one whose name is "--help").

New in Git 2.12.2 (Mar 26, 2017)

Fixes since v2.12.1:
"git status --porcelain" is supposed to give a stable output, but a few strings were left as translatable by mistake.
"Dumb http" transport used to misparse a nonsense http-alternates response, which has been fixed.
"git diff --quiet" relies on the size field in diff_filespec to be correctly populated, but diff_populate_filespec() helper function made an incorrect short-cut when asked only to populate the size field for paths that need to go through convert_to_git() (e.g. CRLF conversion).
There is no need for Python only to give a few messages to the standard error stream, but we somehow did.
A leak in a codepath to read from a packed object in (rare) cases has been plugged.
"git upload-pack", which is a counter-part of "git fetch", did not report a request for a ref that was not advertised as invalid. This is generally not a problem (because "git fetch" will stop before making such a request), but is the right thing to do.
A "gc.log" file left by a backgrounded "gc --auto" disables further automatic gc; it has been taught to run at least once a day (by default) by ignoring a stale "gc.log" file that is too old.
"git remote rm X", when a branch has remote X configured as the value of its branch.*.remote, tried to remove branch.*.remote and branch.*.merge and failed if either is unset.
A caller of tempfile API that uses stdio interface to write to files may ignore errors while writing, which is detected when tempfile is closed (with a call to ferror()). By that time, the original errno that may have told us what went wrong is likely to be long gone and was overwritten by an irrelevant value. close_tempfile() now resets errno to EIO to make errno at least predictable.
"git show-branch" expected there were only very short branch names in the repository and used a fixed-length buffer to hold them without checking for overflow.
The code that parses header fields in the commit object has been updated for (micro)performance and code hygiene.
A test that creates a confusing branch whose name is HEAD has been corrected not to do so.
"Cc:" on the trailer part does not have to conform to RFC strictly, unlike in the e-mail header. "git send-email" has been updated to ignore anything after '>' when picking addresses, to allow non-address cruft like " # stable 4.4" after the address.
"git push" had a handful of codepaths that could lead to a deadlock when unexpected error happened, which has been fixed.
Code to read submodule..ignore config did not state the variable name correctly when giving an error message diagnosing misconfiguration.
"git ls-remote" and "git archive --remote" are designed to work without being in a directory under Git's control. However, recent updates revealed that we randomly look into a directory called .git/ without actually doing necessary set-up when working in a repository. Stop doing so.
The code to parse the command line "git grep ... [[--] ...]" has been cleaned up, and a handful of bugs have been fixed (e.g. we used to check "--" if it is a rev).
The code to parse "git -c VAR=VAL cmd" and set configuration variable for the duration of cmd had two small bugs, which have been fixed. This supersedes jc/config-case-cmdline topic that has been discarded.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.12.1 (Mar 21, 2017)

New in Git 2.12.0 (Feb 25, 2017)

UPDATES SINCE V2.11:
UI, Workflows & Features:
Various updates to "git p4".
"git p4" didn't interact with the internal of .git directory correctly in the modern "git-worktree"-enabled world.
"git branch --list" and friends learned "--ignore-case" option to optionally sort branches and tags case insensitively.
In addition to %(subject), %(body), "log --pretty=format:..." learned a new placeholder %(trailers).
"git rebase" learned "--quit" option, which allows a user to remove the metadata left by an earlier "git rebase" that was manually aborted without using "git rebase --abort".
"git clone --reference $there --recurse-submodules $super" has been taught to guess repositories usable as references for submodules of $super that are embedded in $there while making a clone of the superproject borrow objects from $there; extend the mechanism to also allow submodules of these submodules to borrow repositories embedded in these clones of the submodules embedded in the clone of the superproject.
Porcelain scripts written in Perl are getting internationalized.
"git merge --continue" has been added as a synonym to "git commit" to conclude a merge that has stopped due to conflicts.
Finer-grained control of what protocols are allowed for transports during clone/fetch/push have been enabled via a new configuration mechanism.
"git shortlog" learned "--committer" option to group commits by committer, instead of author.
GitLFS integration with "git p4" has been updated.
The isatty() emulation for Windows has been updated to eradicate the previous hack that depended on internals of (older) MSVC runtime.
Some platforms no longer understand "latin-1" that is still seen in the wild in e-mail headers; replace them with "iso-8859-1" that is more widely known when conversion fails from/to it.
"git grep" has been taught to optionally recurse into submodules.
"git rm" used to refuse to remove a submodule when it has its own git repository embedded in its working tree. It learned to move the repository away to $GIT_DIR/modules/ of the superproject instead, and allow the submodule to be deleted (as long as there will be no loss of local modifications, that is).
A recent updates to "git p4" was not usable for older p4 but it could be made to work with minimum changes. Do so.
"git diff" learned diff.interHunkContext configuration variable that gives the default value for its --inter-hunk-context option.
The prereleaseSuffix feature of version comparison that is used in "git tag -l" did not correctly when two or more prereleases for the same release were present (e.g. when 2.0, 2.0-beta1, and 2.0-beta2 are there and the code needs to compare 2.0-beta1 and 2.0-beta2).
"git submodule push" learned "--recurse-submodules=only option to push submodules out without pushing the top-level superproject.
"git tag" and "git verify-tag" learned to put GPG verification status in their "--format=" output format.
An ancient repository conversion tool left in contrib/ has been removed.
"git show-ref HEAD" used with "--verify" because the user is not interested in seeing refs/remotes/origin/HEAD, and used with "--head" because the user does not want HEAD to be filtered out, i.e. "git show-ref --head --verify HEAD", did not work as expected.
"git submodule add" used to be confused and refused to add a locally created repository; users can now use "--force" option to add them. (merge 619acfc78c sb/submodule-add-force later to maint).
Some people feel the default set of colors used by "git log --graph" rather limiting. A mechanism to customize the set of colors has been introduced.
"git read-tree" and its underlying unpack_trees() machinery learned to report problematic paths prefixed with the --super-prefix option.
When a submodule "A", which has another submodule "B" nested within it, is "absorbed" into the top-level superproject, the inner submodule "B" used to be left in a strange state. The logic to adjust the .git pointers in these submodules has been corrected.
The user can specify a custom update method that is run when "submodule update" updates an already checked out submodule. This was ignored when checking the submodule out for the first time and we instead always just checked out the commit that is bound to the path in the superproject's index.
The command line completion (in contrib/) learned that "git diff --submodule=" can take "diff" as a recently added option.
The "core.logAllRefUpdates" that used to be boolean has been enhanced to take 'always' as well, to record ref updates to refs other than the ones that are expected to be updated (i.e. branches, remote-tracking branches and notes).
Comes with more command line completion (in contrib/) for recently introduced options.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
Commands that operate on a log message and add lines to the trailer blocks, such as "format-patch -s", "cherry-pick (-x|-s)", and "commit -s", have been taught to use the logic of and share the code with "git interpret-trailer".
The default Travis-CI configuration specifies newer P4 and GitLFS.
The "fast hash" that had disastrous performance issues in some corner cases has been retired from the internal diff.
The character width table has been updated to match Unicode 9.0
Update the procedure to generate "tags" for developer support.
The codeflow of setting NOATIME and CLOEXEC on file descriptors Git opens has been simplified.
"git diff" and its family had two experimental heuristics to shift the contents of a hunk to make the patch easier to read. One of them turns out to be better than the other, so leave only the "--indent-heuristic" option and remove the other one.
A new submodule helper "git submodule embedgitdirs" to make it easier to move embedded .git/ directory for submodules in a superproject to .git/modules/ (and point the latter with the former that is turned into a "gitdir:" file) has been added.
"git push \serversharedir" has recently regressed and then fixed. A test has retroactively been added for this breakage.
Build updates for Cygwin.
The implementation of "real_path()" was to go there with chdir(2) and call getcwd(3), but this obviously wouldn't be usable in a threaded environment. Rewrite it to manually resolve relative paths including symbolic links in path components.
Adjust documentation to help AsciiDoctor render better while not breaking the rendering done by AsciiDoc.
The sequencer machinery has been further enhanced so that a later set of patches can start using it to reimplement "rebase -i".
Update the definition of the MacOSX test environment used by TravisCI.
Rewrite a scripted porcelain "git difftool" in C.
"make -C t failed" will now run only the tests that failed in the previous run. This is usable only when prove is not use, and gives a useless error message when run after "make clean", but otherwise is serviceable.
"uchar [40]" to "struct object_id" conversion continues.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.10:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.9 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).
We often decide if a session is interactive by checking if the standard I/O streams are connected to a TTY, but isatty() that comes with Windows incorrectly returned true if it is used on NUL (i.e. an equivalent to /dev/null). This has been fixed.
"git svn" did not work well with path components that are "0", and some configuration variable it uses were not documented.
"git rev-parse --symbolic" failed with a more recent notation like "HEAD^-1" and "HEAD^!".
An empty directory in a working tree that can simply be nuked used to interfere while merging or cherry-picking a change to create a submodule directory there, which has been fixed..
The code in "git push" to compute if any commit being pushed in the superproject binds a commit in a submodule that hasn't been pushed out was overly inefficient, making it unusable even for a small project that does not have any submodule but have a reasonable number of refs.
"git push --dry-run --recurse-submodule=on-demand" wasn't "--dry-run" in the submodules.
The output from "git worktree list" was made in readdir() order, and was unstable.
mergetool..trustExitCode configuration variable did not apply to built-in tools, but now it does.
"git p4" LFS support was broken when LFS stores an empty blob.
A corner case in merge-recursive regression that crept in during 2.10 development cycle has been fixed.
Transport with dumb http can be fooled into following foreign URLs that the end user does not intend to, especially with the server side redirects and http-alternates mechanism, which can lead to security issues. Tighten the redirection and make it more obvious to the end user when it happens.
Update the error messages from the dumb-http client when it fails to obtain loose objects; we used to give sensible error message only upon 404 but we now forbid unexpected redirects that needs to be reported with something sensible.
When diff.renames configuration is on (and with Git 2.9 and later, it is enabled by default, which made it worse), "git stash" misbehaved if a file is removed and another file with a very similar content is added.
"git diff --no-index" did not take "--no-abbrev" option.
"git difftool --dir-diff" had a minor regression when started from a subdirectory, which has been fixed.
"git commit --allow-empty --only" (no pathspec) with dirty index ought to be an acceptable way to create a new commit that does not change any paths, but it was forbidden, perhaps because nobody needed it so far.
Git 2.11 had a minor regression in "merge --ff-only" that competed with another process that simultanously attempted to update the index. We used to explain what went wrong with an error message, but the new code silently failed. The error message has been resurrected.
A pathname that begins with "//" or "\" on Windows is special but path normalization logic was unaware of it.
"git pull --rebase", when there is no new commits on our side since we forked from the upstream, should be able to fast-forward without invoking "git rebase", but it didn't.
The way to specify hotkeys to "xxdiff" that is used by "git mergetool" has been modernized to match recent versions of xxdiff.
Unlike "git am --abort", "git cherry-pick --abort" moved HEAD back to where cherry-pick started while picking multiple changes, when the cherry-pick stopped to ask for help from the user, and the user did "git reset --hard" to a different commit in order to re-attempt the operation.
Code cleanup in shallow boundary computation.
A recent update to receive-pack to make it easier to drop garbage objects made it clear that GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES cannot have a pathname with a colon in it (no surprise!), and this in turn made it impossible to push into a repository at such a path. This has been fixed by introducing a quoting mechanism used when appending such a path to the colon-separated list.
The function usage_msg_opt() has been updated to say "fatal:" before the custom message programs give, when they want to die with a message about wrong command line options followed by the standard usage string.
"git index-pack --stdin" needs an access to an existing repository, but "git index-pack file.pack" to generate an .idx file that corresponds to a packfile does not.
Fix for NDEBUG builds.
A lazy "git push" without refspec did not internally use a fully specified refspec to perform 'current', 'simple', or 'upstream' push, causing unnecessary "ambiguous ref" errors.
"git p4" misbehaved when swapping a directory and a symbolic link.
Even though an fix was attempted in Git 2.9.3 days, but running "git difftool --dir-diff" from a subdirectory never worked. This has been fixed.
"git p4" that tracks multile p4 paths imported a single changelist that touches files in these multiple paths as one commit, followed by many empty commits. This has been fixed.
A potential but unlikely buffer overflow in Windows port has been fixed.
When the http server gives an incomplete response to a smart-http rpc call, it could lead to client waiting for a full response that will never come. Teach the client side to notice this condition and abort the transfer.
Compression setting for producing packfiles were spread across three codepaths, one of which did not honor any configuration. Unify these so that all of them honor core.compression and pack.compression variables the same way.
"git fast-import" sometimes mishandled while rebalancing notes tree, which has been fixed.
Recent update to the default abbreviation length that auto-scales lacked documentation update, which has been corrected.
Leakage of lockfiles in the config subsystem has been fixed.
It is natural that "git gc --auto" may not attempt to pack everything into a single pack, and there is no point in warning when the user has configured the system to use the pack bitmap, leading to disabling further "gc".
"git archive" did not read the standard configuration files, and failed to notice a file that is marked as binary via the userdiff driver configuration.
"git blame --porcelain" misidentified the "previous" pair (aka "source") when contents came from two or more files.
"git rebase -i" with a recent update started showing an incorrect count when squashing more than 10 commits.
"git @{push}" on a detached HEAD used to segfault; it has been corrected to error out with a message.
Running "git add a/b" when "a" is a submodule correctly errored out, but without a meaningful error message. (merge 2d81c48fa7 sb/pathspec-errors later to maint).
Typing ^C to pager, which usually does not kill it, killed Git and took the pager down as a collateral damage in certain process-tree structure. This has been fixed.
"git mergetool" without any pathspec on the command line that is run from a subdirectory became no-op in Git v2.11 by mistake, which has been fixed.
Retire long unused/unmaintained gitview from the contrib/ area. (merge 3120925c25 sb/remove-gitview later to maint).
Tighten a test to avoid mistaking an extended ERE regexp engine as a PRE regexp engine.
An error message with an ASCII control character like 'r' in it can alter the message to hide its early part, which is problematic when a remote side gives such an error message that the local side will relay with a "remote: " prefix. (merge f290089879 jk/vreport-sanitize later to maint).
"git fsck" inspects loose objects more carefully now. (merge cce044df7f jk/loose-object-fsck later to maint).
A crashing bug introduced in v2.11 timeframe has been found (it is triggerable only in fast-import) and fixed. (merge abd5a00268 jk/clear-delta-base-cache-fix later to maint).
With an anticipatory tweak for remotes defined in ~/.gitconfig (e.g. "remote.origin.prune" set to true, even though there may or may not actually be "origin" remote defined in a particular Git repository), "git remote rename" and other commands misinterpreted and behaved as if such a non-existing remote actually existed. (merge e459b073fb js/remote-rename-with-half-configured-remote later to maint).
A few codepaths had to rely on a global variable when sorting elements of an array because sort(3) API does not allow extra data to be passed to the comparison function. Use qsort_s() when natively available, and a fallback implementation of it when not, to eliminate the need, which is a prerequisite for making the codepath reentrant.
"git fsck --connectivity-check" was not working at all. (merge a2b22854bd jk/fsck-connectivity-check-fix later to maint).
After starting "git rebase -i", which first opens the user's editor to edit the series of patches to apply, but before saving the contents of that file, "git status" failed to show the current state (i.e. you are in an interactive rebase session, but you have applied no steps yet) correctly. (merge df9ded4984 js/status-pre-rebase-i later to maint).
Test tweak for FreeBSD where /usr/bin/unzip is unsuitable to run our tests but /usr/local/bin/unzip is usable. (merge d98b2c5fce js/unzip-in-usr-bin-workaround later to maint).
"git p4" did not work well with multiple git-p4.mapUser entries on Windows. (merge c3c2b05776 gv/mingw-p4-mapuser later to maint).
"git help" enumerates executable files in $PATH; the implementation of "is this file executable?" on Windows has been optimized. (merge c755015f79 hv/mingw-help-is-executable later to maint).
Test tweaks for those who have default ACL in their git source tree that interfere with the umask test. (merge d549d21307 mm/reset-facl-before-umask-test later to maint).
Names of the various hook scripts must be spelled exactly, but on Windows, an .exe binary must be named with .exe suffix; notice $GIT_DIR/hooks/.exe as a valid hook. (merge 235be51fbe js/mingw-hooks-with-exe-suffix later to maint).
Asciidoctor, an alternative reimplementation of AsciiDoc, still needs some changes to work with documents meant to be formatted with AsciiDoc. "make USE_ASCIIDOCTOR=YesPlease" to use it out of the box to document our pages is getting closer to reality.
Correct command line completion (in contrib/) on "git svn" (merge 2cbad17642 ew/complete-svn-authorship-options later to maint).
Incorrect usage help message for "git worktree prune" has been fixed. (merge 2488dcab22 ps/worktree-prune-help-fix later to maint).
Adjust a perf test to new world order where commands that do require a repository are really strict about having a repository. (merge c86000c1a7 rs/p5302-create-repositories-before-tests later to maint).
"git log --graph" did not work well with "--name-only", even though other forms of "diff" output were handled correctly. (merge f5022b5fed jk/log-graph-name-only later to maint).
The push-options given via the "--push-options" option were not passed through to external remote helpers such as "smart HTTP" that are invoked via the transport helper.
The documentation explained what "git stash" does to the working tree (after stashing away the local changes) in terms of "reset --hard", which was exposing an unnecessary implementation detail. (merge 20a7e06172 tg/stash-doc-cleanup later to maint).
When "git p4" imports changelist that removes paths, it failed to convert pathnames when the p4 used encoding different from the one used on the Git side. This has been corrected. (merge a8b05162e8 ls/p4-path-encoding later to maint).
A new coccinelle rule that catches a check of !pointer before the pointer is free(3)d, which most likely is a bug. (merge ec6cd14c7a rs/cocci-check-free-only-null later to maint).
"ls-files" run with pathspec has been micro-optimized to avoid having to memmove(3) unnecessary bytes. (merge 96f6d3f61a rs/ls-files-partial-optim later to maint).
A hotfix for a topic already in 'master'. (merge a4d92d579f js/mingw-isatty later to maint).
Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.

New in Git 2.11.1 (Feb 3, 2017)

Fixes:
The default Travis-CI configuration specifies newer P4 and GitLFS.
The character width table has been updated to match Unicode 9.0
Update the isatty() emulation for Windows by updating the previous hack that depended on internals of (older) MSVC runtime.
"git rev-parse --symbolic" failed with a more recent notation like "HEAD^-1" and "HEAD^!".
An empty directory in a working tree that can simply be nuked used to interfere while merging or cherry-picking a change to create a submodule directory there, which has been fixed..
The code in "git push" to compute if any commit being pushed in the superproject binds a commit in a submodule that hasn't been pushed out was overly inefficient, making it unusable even for a small project that does not have any submodule but have a reasonable number of refs.
"git push --dry-run --recurse-submodule=on-demand" wasn't "--dry-run" in the submodules.
The output from "git worktree list" was made in readdir() order, and was unstable.
mergetool..trustExitCode configuration variable did not apply to built-in tools, but now it does.
"git p4" LFS support was broken when LFS stores an empty blob.
Fix a corner case in merge-recursive regression that crept in during 2.10 development cycle.
Update the error messages from the dumb-http client when it fails to obtain loose objects; we used to give sensible error message only upon 404 but we now forbid unexpected redirects that needs to be reported with something sensible.
When diff.renames configuration is on (and with Git 2.9 and later, it is enabled by default, which made it worse), "git stash" misbehaved if a file is removed and another file with a very similar content is added.
"git diff --no-index" did not take "--no-abbrev" option.
"git difftool --dir-diff" had a minor regression when started from a subdirectory, which has been fixed.
"git commit --allow-empty --only" (no pathspec) with dirty index ought to be an acceptable way to create a new commit that does not change any paths, but it was forbidden, perhaps because nobody needed it so far.
A pathname that begins with "//" or "\" on Windows is special but path normalization logic was unaware of it.
"git pull --rebase", when there is no new commits on our side since we forked from the upstream, should be able to fast-forward without invoking "git rebase", but it didn't.
The way to specify hotkeys to "xxdiff" that is used by "git mergetool" has been modernized to match recent versions of xxdiff.
Unlike "git am --abort", "git cherry-pick --abort" moved HEAD back to where cherry-pick started while picking multiple changes, when the cherry-pick stopped to ask for help from the user, and the user did "git reset --hard" to a different commit in order to re-attempt the operation.
Code cleanup in shallow boundary computation.
A recent update to receive-pack to make it easier to drop garbage objects made it clear that GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES cannot have a pathname with a colon in it (no surprise!), and this in turn made it impossible to push into a repository at such a path. This has been fixed by introducing a quoting mechanism used when appending such a path to the colon-separated list.
The function usage_msg_opt() has been updated to say "fatal:" before the custom message programs give, when they want to die with a message about wrong command line options followed by the standard usage string.
"git index-pack --stdin" needs an access to an existing repository, but "git index-pack file.pack" to generate an .idx file that corresponds to a packfile does not.
Fix for NDEBUG builds.
A lazy "git push" without refspec did not internally use a fully specified refspec to perform 'current', 'simple', or 'upstream' push, causing unnecessary "ambiguous ref" errors.
"git p4" misbehaved when swapping a directory and a symbolic link.
Even though an fix was attempted in Git 2.9.3 days, but running "git difftool --dir-diff" from a subdirectory never worked. This has been fixed.
"git p4" that tracks multile p4 paths imported a single changelist that touches files in these multiple paths as one commit, followed by many empty commits. This has been fixed.
A potential but unlikely buffer overflow in Windows port has been fixed.
When the http server gives an incomplete response to a smart-http rpc call, it could lead to client waiting for a full response that will never come. Teach the client side to notice this condition and abort the transfer.
Some platforms no longer understand "latin-1" that is still seen in the wild in e-mail headers; replace them with "iso-8859-1" that is more widely known when conversion fails from/to it.
Update the procedure to generate "tags" for developer support.
Update the definition of the MacOSX test environment used by TravisCI.
A few git-svn updates.
Compression setting for producing packfiles were spread across three codepaths, one of which did not honor any configuration. Unify these so that all of them honor core.compression and pack.compression variables the same way.
"git fast-import" sometimes mishandled while rebalancing notes tree, which has been fixed.
Recent update to the default abbreviation length that auto-scales lacked documentation update, which has been corrected.
Leakage of lockfiles in the config subsystem has been fixed.
It is natural that "git gc --auto" may not attempt to pack everything into a single pack, and there is no point in warning when the user has configured the system to use the pack bitmap, leading to disabling further "gc".
"git archive" did not read the standard configuration files, and failed to notice a file that is marked as binary via the userdiff driver configuration.
"git blame --porcelain" misidentified the "previous" pair (aka "source") when contents came from two or more files.
"git rebase -i" with a recent update started showing an incorrect count when squashing more than 10 commits.
"git @{push}" on a detached HEAD used to segfault; it has been corrected to error out with a message.
Tighten a test to avoid mistaking an extended ERE regexp engine as a PRE regexp engine.
Typing ^C to pager, which usually does not kill it, killed Git and took the pager down as a collateral damage in certain process-tree structure. This has been fixed.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.11.0 (Dec 5, 2016)

UPDATES SINCE V2.10:
UI, Workflows & Features:
Comes with new version of git-gui, now at its 0.21.0 tag.
"git format-patch --cover-letter HEAD^" to format a single patch with a separate cover letter now numbers the output as [PATCH 0/1] and [PATCH 1/1] by default.
An incoming "git push" that attempts to push too many bytes can now be rejected by setting a new configuration variable at the receiving end.
"git nosuchcommand --help" said "No manual entry for gitnosuchcommand", which was not intuitive, given that "git nosuchcommand" said "git: 'nosuchcommand' is not a git command".
"git clone --recurse-submodules --reference $path $URL" is a way to reduce network transfer cost by borrowing objects in an existing $path repository when cloning the superproject from $URL; it learned to also peek into $path for presence of corresponding repositories of submodules and borrow objects from there when able.
The "git diff --submodule={short,log}" mechanism has been enhanced to allow "--submodule=diff" to show the patch between the submodule commits bound to the superproject.
Even though "git hash-objects", which is a tool to take an on-filesystem data stream and put it into the Git object store, can perform "outside-world-to-Git" conversions (e.g. end-of-line conversions and application of the clean-filter), and it has had this feature on by default from very early days, its reverse operation "git cat-file", which takes an object from the Git object store and externalizes it for consumption by the outside world, lacked an equivalent mechanism to run the "Git-to-outside-world" conversion. The command learned the "--filters" option to do so.
Output from "git diff" can be made easier to read by intelligently selecting which lines are common and which lines are added/deleted when the lines before and after the changed section are the same. A command line option (--indent-heuristic) and a configuration variable (diff.indentHeuristic) are added to help with the experiment to find good heuristics.
In some projects, it is common to use "[RFC PATCH]" as the subject prefix for a patch meant for discussion rather than application. A new format-patch option "--rfc" is a short-hand for "--subject-prefix=RFC PATCH" to help the participants of such projects.
"git add --chmod={+,-}x " only changed the executable bit for paths that are either new or modified. This has been corrected to change the executable bit for all paths that match the given pathspec.
When "git format-patch --stdout" output is placed as an in-body header and it uses RFC2822 header folding, "git am" fails to put the header line back into a single logical line. The underlying "git mailinfo" was taught to handle this properly.
"gitweb" can spawn "highlight" to show blob contents with (programming) language-specific syntax highlighting, but only when the language is known. "highlight" can however be told to guess the language itself by giving it "--force" option, which has been enabled.
"git gui" l10n to Portuguese.
When given an abbreviated object name that is not (or more realistically, "no longer") unique, we gave a fatal error "ambiguous argument". This error is now accompanied by a hint that lists the objects beginning with the given prefix. During the course of development of this new feature, numerous minor bugs were uncovered and corrected, the most notable one of which is that we gave "short SHA1 xxxx is ambiguous." twice without good reason.
"git log rev^..rev" is an often-used revision range specification to show what was done on a side branch merged at rev. This has gained a short-hand "rev^-1". In general "rev^-$n" is the same as "^rev^$n rev", i.e. what has happened on other branches while the history leading to nth parent was looking the other way.
In recent versions of cURL, GSSAPI credential delegation is disabled by default due to CVE-2011-2192; introduce a http.delegation configuration variable to selectively allow enabling this. (merge 26a7b23429 ps/http-gssapi-cred-delegation later to maint).
"git mergetool" learned to honor "-O" to control the order of paths to present to the end user.
"git diff/log --ws-error-highlight=" lacked the corresponding configuration variable (diff.wsErrorHighlight) to set it by default.
"git ls-files" learned the "--recurse-submodules" option to get a listing of tracked files across submodules (i.e. this only works with the "--cached" option, not for listing untracked or ignored files). This would be a useful tool to sit on the upstream side of a pipe that is read with xargs to work on all working tree files from the top-level superproject.
A new credential helper that talks via "libsecret" with implementations of XDG Secret Service API has been added to contrib/credential/.
The GPG verification status shown by the "%G?" pretty format specifier was not rich enough to differentiate a signature made by an expired key, a signature made by a revoked key, etc. New output letters have been assigned to express them.
In addition to purely abbreviated commit object names, "gitweb" learned to turn "git describe" output (e.g. v2.9.3-599-g2376d31787) into clickable links in its output.
"git commit" created an empty commit when invoked with an index consisting solely of intend-to-add paths (added with "git add -N"). It now requires the "--allow-empty" option to create such a commit. The same logic prevented "git status" from showing such paths as "new files" in the "Changes not staged for commit" section.
The smudge/clean filter API spawns an external process to filter the contents of each path that has a filter defined. A new type of "process" filter API has been added to allow the first request to run the filter for a path to spawn a single process, and all filtering is served by this single process for multiple paths, reducing the process creation overhead.
The user always has to say "stash@{$N}" when naming a single element in the default location of the stash, i.e. reflogs in refs/stash. The "git stash" command learned to accept "git stash apply 4" as a short-hand for "git stash apply stash@{4}".
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support:
The delta-base-cache mechanism has been a key to the performance in a repository with a tightly packed packfile, but it did not scale well even with a larger value of core.deltaBaseCacheLimit.
Enhance "git status --porcelain" output by collecting more data on the state of the index and the working tree files, which may further be used to teach git-prompt (in contrib/) to make fewer calls to git.
Extract a small helper out of the function that reads the authors script file "git am" internally uses. (merge a77598e jc/am-read-author-file later to maint).
Lift calls to exit(2) and die() higher in the callchain in sequencer.c files so that more helper functions in it can be used by callers that want to handle error conditions themselves.
"git am" has been taught to make an internal call to "git apply"'s innards without spawning the latter as a separate process.
The ref-store abstraction was introduced to the refs API so that we can plug in different backends to store references.
The "unsigned char sha1[20]" to "struct object_id" conversion continues. Notable changes in this round includes that ce->sha1, i.e. the object name recorded in the cache_entry, turns into an object_id.
JGit can show a fake ref "capabilities^{}" to "git fetch" when it does not advertise any refs, but "git fetch" was not prepared to see such an advertisement. When the other side disconnects without giving any ref advertisement, we used to say "there may not be a repository at that URL", but we may have seen other advertisements like "shallow" and ".have" in which case we definitely know that a repository is there. The code to detect this case has also been updated.
Some codepaths in "git pack-objects" were not ready to use an existing pack bitmap; now they are and as a result they have become faster.
The codepath in "git fsck" to detect malformed tree objects has been updated not to die but keep going after detecting them.
We call "qsort(array, nelem, sizeof(array[0]), fn)", and most of the time third parameter is redundant. A new QSORT() macro lets us omit it.
"git pack-objects" in a repository with many packfiles used to spend a lot of time looking for/at objects in them; the accesses to the packfiles are now optimized by checking the most-recently-used packfile first. (merge c9af708b1a jk/pack-objects-optim-mru later to maint).
Codepaths involved in interacting alternate object stores have been cleaned up.
In order for the receiving end of "git push" to inspect the received history and decide to reject the push, the objects sent from the sending end need to be made available to the hook and the mechanism for the connectivity check, and this was done traditionally by storing the objects in the receiving repository and letting "git gc" expire them. Instead, store the newly received objects in a temporary area, and make them available by reusing the alternate object store mechanism to them only while we decide if we accept the check, and once we decide, either migrate them to the repository or purge them immediately.
The require_clean_work_tree() helper was recreated in C when "git pull" was rewritten from shell; the helper is now made available to other callers in preparation for upcoming "rebase -i" work.
"git upload-pack" had its code cleaned-up and performance improved by reducing use of timestamp-ordered commit-list, which was replaced with a priority queue.
"git diff --no-index" codepath has been updated not to try to peek into a .git/ directory that happens to be under the current directory, when we know we are operating outside any repository.
Update of the sequencer codebase to make it reusable to reimplement "rebase -i" continues.
Git generally does not explicitly close file descriptors that were open in the parent process when spawning a child process, but most of the time the child does not want to access them. As Windows does not allow removing or renaming a file that has a file descriptor open, a slow-to-exit child can even break the parent process by holding onto them. Use O_CLOEXEC flag to open files in various codepaths.
Update "interpret-trailers" machinery and teach it that people in the real world write all sorts of cruft in the "trailer" that was originally designed to have the neat-o "Mail-Header: like thing" and nothing else.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.10:
Clarify various ways to specify the "revision ranges" in the documentation.
"diff-highlight" script (in contrib/) learned to work better with "git log -p --graph" output.
The test framework left the number of tests and success/failure count in the t/test-results directory, keyed by the name of the test script plus the process ID. The latter however turned out not to serve any useful purpose. The process ID part of the filename has been removed.
Having a submodule whose ".git" repository is somehow corrupt caused a few commands that recurse into submodules to loop forever.
"git symbolic-ref -d HEAD" happily removes the symbolic ref, but the resulting repository becomes an invalid one. Teach the command to forbid removal of HEAD.
A test spawned a short-lived background process, which sometimes prevented the test directory from getting removed at the end of the script on some platforms.
Update a few tests that used to use GIT_CURL_VERBOSE to use the newer GIT_TRACE_CURL.
"git pack-objects --include-tag" was taught that when we know that we are sending an object C, we want a tag B that directly points at C but also a tag A that points at the tag B. We used to miss the intermediate tag B in some cases.
Update Japanese translation for "git-gui".
"git fetch http::/site/path" did not die correctly and segfaulted instead.
"git commit-tree" stopped reading commit.gpgsign configuration variable that was meant for Porcelain "git commit" in Git 2.9; we forgot to update "git gui" to look at the configuration to match this change.
"git add --chmod={+,-}x" added recently lacked documentation, which has been corrected.
"git log --cherry-pick" used to include merge commits as candidates to be matched up with other commits, resulting a lot of wasted time. The patch-id generation logic has been updated to ignore merges and avoid the wastage.
The http transport (with curl-multi option, which is the default these days) failed to remove curl-easy handle from a curlm session, which led to unnecessary API failures.
There were numerous corner cases in which the configuration files are read and used or not read at all depending on the directory a Git command was run, leading to inconsistent behaviour. The code to set-up repository access at the beginning of a Git process has been updated to fix them. (merge 4d0efa1 jk/setup-sequence-update later to maint).
"git diff -W" output needs to extend the context backward to include the header line of the current function and also forward to include the body of the entire current function up to the header line of the next one. This process may have to merge two adjacent hunks, but the code forgot to do so in some cases.
Performance tests done via "t/perf" did not use the right build configuration if the user relied on autoconf generated configuration.
"git format-patch --base=..." feature that was recently added showed the base commit information after the "-- " e-mail signature line, which turned out to be inconvenient. The base information has been moved above the signature line.
More i18n.
Even when "git pull --rebase=preserve" (and the underlying "git rebase --preserve") can complete without creating any new commits (i.e. fast-forwards), it still insisted on having usable ident information (read: user.email is set correctly), which was less than nice. As the underlying commands used inside "git rebase" would fail with a more meaningful error message and advice text when the bogus ident matters, this extra check was removed.
"git gc --aggressive" used to limit the delta-chain length to 250, which is way too deep for gaining additional space savings and is detrimental for runtime performance. The limit has been reduced to 50.
Documentation for individual configuration variables to control use of color (like `color.grep`) said that their default value is 'false', instead of saying their default is taken from `color.ui`. When we updated the default value for color.ui from 'false' to 'auto' quite a while ago, all of them broke. This has been corrected.
The pretty-format specifier "%C(auto)" used by the "log" family of commands to enable coloring of the output is taught to also issue a color-reset sequence to the output.
A shell script example in check-ref-format documentation has been fixed.
"git checkout " does not follow the usual disambiguation rules when the can be both a rev and a path, to allow checking out a branch 'foo' in a project that happens to have a file 'foo' in the working tree without having to disambiguate. This was poorly documented and the check was incorrect when the command was run from a subdirectory.
Some codepaths in "git diff" used regexec(3) on a buffer that was mmap(2)ed, which may not have a terminating NUL, leading to a read beyond the end of the mapped region. This was fixed by introducing a regexec_buf() helper that takes a pair with REG_STARTEND extension.
The procedure to build Git on Mac OS X for Travis CI hardcoded the internal directory structure we assumed HomeBrew uses, which was a no-no. The procedure has been updated to ask HomeBrew things we need to know to fix this.
When "git rebase -i" is given a broken instruction, it told the user to fix it with "--edit-todo", but didn't say what the step after that was (i.e. "--continue").
Documentation around tools to import from CVS was fairly outdated.
"git clone --recurse-submodules" lost the progress eye-candy in a recent update, which has been corrected.
A low-level function verify_packfile() was meant to show errors that were detected without dying itself, but under some conditions it didn't and died instead, which has been fixed.
When "git fetch" tries to find where the history of the repository it runs in has diverged from what the other side has, it has a mechanism to avoid digging too deep into irrelevant side branches. This however did not work well over the "smart-http" transport due to a design bug, which has been fixed.
In the codepath that comes up with the hostname to be used in an e-mail when the user didn't tell us, we looked at the ai_canonname field in struct addrinfo without making sure it is not NULL first.
"git worktree", even though it used the default_abbrev setting that ought to be affected by the core.abbrev configuration variable, ignored the variable setting. The command has been taught to read the default set of configuration variables to correct this.
"git init" tried to record core.worktree in the repository's 'config' file when the GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable was set and it was different from where GIT_DIR appears as ".git" at its top, but the logic was faulty when .git is a "gitdir:" file that points at the real place, causing trouble in working trees that are managed by "git worktree". This has been corrected.
Codepaths that read from an on-disk loose object were too loose in validating that they are reading a proper object file and sometimes read past the data they read from the disk, which has been corrected. H/t to Gustavo Grieco for reporting.
The original command line syntax for "git merge", which was "git merge HEAD ...", has been deprecated for quite some time, and "git gui" was the last in-tree user of the syntax. This is finally fixed, so that we can move forward with the deprecation.
An author name that has a backslash-quoted double quote in the human readable part ("My "double quoted" name"), was not unquoted correctly while applying a patch from a piece of e-mail.
Doc update to clarify what "log -3 --reverse" does.
Almost everybody uses DEFAULT_ABBREV to refer to the default setting for the abbreviation, but "git blame" peeked into underlying variable bypassing the macro for no good reason.
The "graph" API used in "git log --graph" miscounted the number of output columns consumed so far when drawing a padding line, which has been fixed; this did not affect any existing code as nobody tried to write anything after the padding on such a line, though.
The code that parses the format parameter of the for-each-ref command has seen a micro-optimization.
When we started to use cURL to talk to an imap server, we forgot to explicitly add imap(s):// before the destination. To some folks, that didn't work and the library tried to make HTTP(s) requests instead.
The ./configure script generated from configure.ac was taught how to detect support of SSL by libcurl better.
The command-line completion script (in contrib/) learned to complete "git cmd ^mas" to complete the negative end of reference to "git cmd ^master". (merge 49416ad22a cp/completion-negative-refs later to maint).
The existing "git fetch --depth=" option was hard to use correctly when making the history of an existing shallow clone deeper. A new option, "--deepen=", has been added to make this easier to use. "git clone" also learned "--shallow-since=" and "--shallow-exclude=" options to make it easier to specify "I am interested only in the recent N months worth of history" and "Give me only the history since that version". (merge cccf74e2da nd/shallow-deepen later to maint).
"git blame --reverse OLD path" is now DWIMmed to show how lines in path in an old revision OLD have survived up to the current commit. (merge e1d09701a4 jc/blame-reverse later to maint).
The http.emptyauth configuration variable is a way to allow an empty username to pass when attempting to authenticate using mechanisms like Kerberos. We took an unspecified (NULL) username and sent ":" (i.e. no username, no password) to CURLOPT_USERPWD, but did not do the same when the username is explicitly set to an empty string.
"git clone" of a local repository can be done at the filesystem level, but the codepath did not check errors while copying and adjusting the file that lists alternate object stores.
Documentation for "git commit" was updated to clarify that "commit -p " adds to the current contents of the index to come up with what to commit.
A stray symbolic link in the $GIT_DIR/refs/ directory could make name resolution loop forever, which has been corrected.
The "submodule..path" stored in .gitmodules is never copied to .git/config and such a key in .git/config has no meaning, but the documentation described it next to submodule..url as if both belong to .git/config. This has been fixed.
In a worktree created via "git worktree", "git checkout" attempts to protect users from confusion by refusing to check out a branch that is already checked out in another worktree. However, this also prevented checking out a branch which is designated as the primary branch of a bare repository, in a worktree that is connected to the bare repository. The check has been corrected to allow it.
"git rebase" immediately after "git clone" failed to find the fork point from the upstream.
When fetching from a remote that has many tags that are irrelevant to branches we are following, we used to waste way too many cycles checking if the object pointed at by a tag (that we are not going to fetch!) exists in our repository too carefully.
Protect our code from over-eager compilers.
Recent git allows submodule..branch to use a special token "." instead of the branch name; the documentation has been updated to describe it.
"git send-email" attempts to pick up valid e-mails from the trailers, but people in the real world write non-addresses there, like "Cc: Stable # 4.8+", which broke the output depending on the availability and vintage of the Mail::Address perl module. (merge dcfafc5214 mm/send-email-cc-cruft-after-address later to maint).
The Travis CI configuration we ship ran the tests with the --verbose option but this risks non-TAP output that happens to be "ok" to be misinterpreted as TAP signalling a test that passed. This resulted in unnecessary failures. This has been corrected by introducing a new mode to run our tests in the test harness to send the verbose output separately to the log file.
Some AsciiDoc formatters mishandle a displayed illustration with tabs in it. Adjust a few of them in merge-base documentation to work around them.
Fixed a minor regression in "git submodule" that was introduced when more helper functions were reimplemented in C. (merge 77b63ac31e sb/submodule-ignore-trailing-slash later to maint).
The code that we have used for the past 10+ years to cycle 4-element ring buffers turns out to be not quite portable in theoretical world. (merge bb84735c80 rs/ring-buffer-wraparound later to maint).
"git daemon" used fixed-length buffers to turn URLs to the repository the client asked for into the server side directory paths, using snprintf() to avoid overflowing these buffers, but allowed possibly truncated paths to the directory. This has been tightened to reject such a request that causes an overlong path to be served. (merge 6bdb0083be jk/daemon-path-ok-check-truncation later to maint).
Recent update to git-sh-setup (a library of shell functions that are used by our in-tree scripted Porcelain commands) included another shell library git-sh-i18n without specifying where it is, relying on the $PATH. This has been fixed to be more explicit by prefixing with $(git --exec-path) output. (merge 1073094f30 ak/sh-setup-dot-source-i18n-fix later to maint).
Fix for a racy false-positive test failure. (merge fdf4f6c79b as/merge-attr-sleep later to maint).
Portability update and workaround for builds on recent Mac OS X. (merge a296bc0132 ls/macos-update later to maint).
Using a %(HEAD) placeholder in "for-each-ref --format=" option caused the command to segfault when on an unborn branch. (merge 84679d470d jc/for-each-ref-head-segfault-fix later to maint).
"git rebase -i" did not work well with the core.commentchar configuration variable for two reasons, both of which have been fixed. (merge 882cd23777 js/rebase-i-commentchar-fix later to maint).

New in Git 2.11.0 RC0 (Nov 1, 2016)

UI, Workflows & Features:
Comes with new version of git-gui, now at its 0.21.0 tag.
"git format-patch --cover-letter HEAD^" to format a single patch with a separate cover letter now numbers the output as [PATCH 0/1] and [PATCH 1/1] by default.
An incoming "git push" that attempts to push too many bytes can now be rejected by setting a new configuration variable at the receiving end.
"git nosuchcommand --help" said "No manual entry for gitnosuchcommand", which was not intuitive, given that "git nosuchcommand" said "git: 'nosuchcommand' is not a git command".
"git clone --resurse-submodules --reference $path $URL" is a way to reduce network transfer cost by borrowing objects in an existing $path repository when cloning the superproject from $URL; it learned to also peek into $path for presense of corresponding repositories of submodules and borrow objects from there when able.
The "git diff --submodule={short,log}" mechanism has been enhanced to allow "--submodule=diff" to show the patch between the submodule commits bound to the superproject.
Even though "git hash-objects", which is a tool to take an on-filesystem data stream and put it into the Git object store, allowed to perform the "outside-world-to-Git" conversions (e.g. end-of-line conversions and application of the clean-filter), and it had the feature on by default from very early days, its reverse operation "git cat-file", which takes an object from the Git object store and externalize for the consumption by the outside world, lacked an equivalent mechanism to run the "Git-to-outside-world" conversion. The command learned the "--filters" option to do so.
Output from "git diff" can be made easier to read by selecting which lines are common and which lines are added/deleted intelligently when the lines before and after the changed section are the same. A command line option is added to help with the experiment to find a good heuristics.
In some projects, it is common to use "[RFC PATCH]" as the subject prefix for a patch meant for discussion rather than application. A new option "--rfc" was a short-hand for "--subject-prefix=RFC PATCH" to help the participants of such projects.
"git add --chmod=+x " added recently only toggled the executable bit for paths that are either new or modified. This has been corrected to flip the executable bit for all paths that match the given pathspec.
When "git format-patch --stdout" output is placed as an in-body header and it uses the RFC2822 header folding, "git am" failed to put the header line back into a single logical line. The underlying "git mailinfo" was taught to handle this properly.
"gitweb" can spawn "highlight" to show blob contents with (programming) language-specific syntax highlighting, but only when the language is known. "highlight" can however be told to make the guess itself by giving it "--force" option, which has been enabled.
"git gui" l10n to Portuguese.
When given an abbreviated object name that is not (or more realistically, "no longer") unique, we gave a fatal error "ambiguous argument". This error is now accompanied by hints that lists the objects that begins with the given prefix. During the course of development of this new feature, numerous minor bugs were uncovered and corrected, the most notable one of which is that we gave "short SHA1 xxxx is ambiguous." twice without good reason.
"git log rev^..rev" is an often-used revision range specification to show what was done on a side branch merged at rev. This has gained a short-hand "rev^-1". In general "rev^-$n" is the same as "^rev^$n rev", i.e. what has happened on other branches while the history leading to nth parent was looking the other way.
In recent versions of cURL, GSSAPI credential delegation is disabled by default due to CVE-2011-2192; introduce a configuration to selectively allow enabling this. (merge 26a7b23429 ps/http-gssapi-cred-delegation later to maint).
"git mergetool" learned to honor "-O" to control the order of paths to present to the end user.
"git diff/log --ws-error-highlight=" lacked the corresponding configuration variable to set it by default.
"git ls-files" learned "--recurse-submodules" option that can be used to get a listing of tracked files across submodules (i.e. this only works with "--cached" option, not for listing untracked or ignored files). This would be a useful tool to sit on the upstream side of a pipe that is read with xargs to work on all working tree files from the top-level superproject.
A new credential helper that talks via "libsecret" with implementations of XDG Secret Service API has been added to contrib/credential/.
The GPG verification status shown in "%G?" pretty format specifier was not rich enough to differentiate a signature made by an expired key, a signature made by a revoked key, etc. New output letters have been assigned to express them.
In addition to purely abbreviated commit object names, "gitweb" learned to turn "git describe" output (e.g. v2.9.3-599-g2376d31787) into clickable links in its output.
When new paths were added by "git add -N" to the index, it was enough to circumvent the check by "git commit" to refrain from making an empty commit without "--allow-empty". The same logic prevented "git status" to show such a path as "new file" in the "Changes not staged for commit" section.
The smudge/clean filter API expect an external process is spawned to filter the contents for each path that has a filter defined. A new type of "process" filter API has been added to allow the first request to run the filter for a path to spawn a single process, and all filtering need is served by this single process for multiple paths, reducing the process creation overhead.
The user always has to say "stash@{$N}" when naming a single element in the default location of the stash, i.e. reflogs in refs/stash. The "git stash" command learned to accept "git stash apply 4" as a short-hand for "git stash apply stash@{4}".
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
The delta-base-cache mechanism has been a key to the performance in a repository with a tightly packed packfile, but it did not scale well even with a larger value of core.deltaBaseCacheLimit.
Enhance "git status --porcelain" output by collecting more data on the state of the index and the working tree files, which may further be used to teach git-prompt (in contrib/) to make fewer calls to git.
Extract a small helper out of the function that reads the authors script file "git am" internally uses. (merge a77598e jc/am-read-author-file later to maint).
Lifts calls to exit(2) and die() higher in the callchain in sequencer.c files so that more helper functions in it can be used by callers that want to handle error conditions themselves.
"git am" has been taught to make an internal call to "git apply"'s innards without spawning the latter as a separate process.
The ref-store abstraction was introduced to the refs API so that we can plug in different backends to store references.
The "unsigned char sha1[20]" to "struct object_id" conversion continues. Notable changes in this round includes that ce->sha1, i.e. the object name recorded in the cache_entry, turns into an object_id.
JGit can show a fake ref "capabilities^{}" to "git fetch" when it does not advertise any refs, but "git fetch" was not prepared to see such an advertisement. When the other side disconnects without giving any ref advertisement, we used to say "there may not be a repository at that URL", but we may have seen other advertisement like "shallow" and ".have" in which case we definitely know that a repository is there. The code to detect this case has also been updated.
Some codepaths in "git pack-objects" were not ready to use an existing pack bitmap; now they are and as the result they have become faster.
The codepath in "git fsck" to detect malformed tree objects has been updated not to die but keep going after detecting them.
We call "qsort(array, nelem, sizeof(array[0]), fn)", and most of the time third parameter is redundant. A new QSORT() macro lets us omit it.
"git pack-objects" in a repository with many packfiles used to spend a lot of time looking for/at objects in them; the accesses to the packfiles are now optimized by checking the most-recently-used packfile first. (merge c9af708b1a jk/pack-objects-optim-mru later to maint).
Codepaths involved in interacting alternate object store have been cleaned up.
In order for the receiving end of "git push" to inspect the received history and decide to reject the push, the objects sent from the sending end need to be made available to the hook and the mechanism for the connectivity check, and this was done traditionally by storing the objects in the receiving repository and letting "git gc" to expire it. Instead, store the newly received objects in a temporary area, and make them available by reusing the alternate object store mechanism to them only while we decide if we accept the check, and once we decide, either migrate them to the repository or purge them immediately.
The require_clean_work_tree() helper was recreated in C when "git pull" was rewritten from shell; the helper is now made available to other callers in preparation for upcoming "rebase -i" work.
"git upload-pack" had its code cleaned-up and performance improved by reducing use of timestamp-ordered commit-list, which was replaced with a priority queue.
"git diff --no-index" codepath has been updated not to try to peek into .git/ directory that happens to be under the current directory, when we know we are operating outside any repository.
Update of the sequencer codebase to make it reusable to reimplement "rebase -i" continues.
Git generally does not explicitly close file descriptors that were open in the parent process when spawning a child process, but most of the time the child does not want to access them. As Windows does not allow removing or renaming a file that has a file descriptor open, a slow-to-exit child can even break the parent process by holding onto them. Use O_CLOEXEC flag to open files in various codepaths.
Update "interpret-trailers" machinery and teaches it that people in real world write all sorts of crufts in the "trailer" that was originally designed to have the neat-o "Mail-Header: like thing" and nothing else.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.10:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.9 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).
Clarify various ways to specify the "revision ranges" in the documentation.
"diff-highlight" script (in contrib/) learned to work better with "git log -p --graph" output.
The test framework left the number of tests and success/failure count in the t/test-results directory, keyed by the name of the test script plus the process ID. The latter however turned out not to serve any useful purpose. The process ID part of the filename has been removed.
Having a submodule whose ".git" repository is somehow corrupt caused a few commands that recurse into submodules loop forever.
"git symbolic-ref -d HEAD" happily removes the symbolic ref, but the resulting repository becomes an invalid one. Teach the command to forbid removal of HEAD.
A test spawned a short-lived background process, which sometimes prevented the test directory from getting removed at the end of the script on some platforms.
Update a few tests that used to use GIT_CURL_VERBOSE to use the newer GIT_TRACE_CURL.
"git pack-objects --include-tag" was taught that when we know that we are sending an object C, we want a tag B that directly points at C but also a tag A that points at the tag B. We used to miss the intermediate tag B in some cases.
Update Japanese translation for "git-gui".
"git fetch http::/site/path" did not die correctly and segfaulted instead.
"git commit-tree" stopped reading commit.gpgsign configuration variable that was meant for Porcelain "git commit" in Git 2.9; we forgot to update "git gui" to look at the configuration to match this change.
"git add --chmod=+x" added recently lacked documentation, which has been corrected.
"git log --cherry-pick" used to include merge commits as candidates to be matched up with other commits, resulting a lot of wasted time. The patch-id generation logic has been updated to ignore merges to avoid the wastage.
The http transport (with curl-multi option, which is the default these days) failed to remove curl-easy handle from a curlm session, which led to unnecessary API failures.
There were numerous corner cases in which the configuration files are read and used or not read at all depending on the directory a Git command was run, leading to inconsistent behaviour. The code to set-up repository access at the beginning of a Git process has been updated to fix them. (merge 4d0efa1 jk/setup-sequence-update later to maint).
"git diff -W" output needs to extend the context backward to include the header line of the current function and also forward to include the body of the entire current function up to the header line of the next one. This process may have to merge to adjacent hunks, but the code forgot to do so in some cases.
Performance tests done via "t/perf" did not use the same set of build configuration if the user relied on autoconf generated configuration.
"git format-patch --base=..." feature that was recently added showed the base commit information after "-- " e-mail signature line, which turned out to be inconvenient. The base information has been moved above the signature line.
More i18n.
Even when "git pull --rebase=preserve" (and the underlying "git rebase --preserve") can complete without creating any new commit (i.e. fast-forwards), it still insisted on having a usable ident information (read: user.email is set correctly), which was less than nice. As the underlying commands used inside "git rebase" would fail with a more meaningful error message and advice text when the bogus ident matters, this extra check was removed.
"git gc --aggressive" used to limit the delta-chain length to 250, which is way too deep for gaining additional space savings and is detrimental for runtime performance. The limit has been reduced to 50.
Documentation for individual configuration variables to control use of color (like `color.grep`) said that their default value is 'false', instead of saying their default is taken from `color.ui`. When we updated the default value for color.ui from 'false' to 'auto' quite a while ago, all of them broke. This has been corrected.
The pretty-format specifier "%C(auto)" used by the "log" family of commands to enable coloring of the output is taught to also issue a color-reset sequence to the output.
A shell script example in check-ref-format documentation has been fixed.
"git checkout " does not follow the usual disambiguation rules when the can be both a rev and a path, to allow checking out a branch 'foo' in a project that happens to have a file 'foo' in the working tree without having to disambiguate. This was poorly documented and the check was incorrect when the command was run from a subdirectory.
Some codepaths in "git diff" used regexec(3) on a buffer that was mmap(2)ed, which may not have a terminating NUL, leading to a read beyond the end of the mapped region. This was fixed by introducing a regexec_buf() helper that takes a pair with REG_STARTEND extension.
The procedure to build Git on Mac OS X for Travis CI hardcoded the internal directory structure we assumed HomeBrew uses, which was a no-no. The procedure has been updated to ask HomeBrew things we need to know to fix this.
When "git rebase -i" is given a broken instruction, it told the user to fix it with "--edit-todo", but didn't say what the step after that was (i.e. "--continue").
Documentation around tools to import from CVS was fairly outdated.
"git clone --recurse-submodules" lost the progress eye-candy in recent update, which has been corrected.
A low-level function verify_packfile() was meant to show errors that were detected without dying itself, but under some conditions it didn't and died instead, which has been fixed.
When "git fetch" tries to find where the history of the repository it runs in has diverged from what the other side has, it has a mechanism to avoid digging too deep into irrelevant side branches. This however did not work well over the "smart-http" transport due to a design bug, which has been fixed.
In the codepath that comes up with the hostname to be used in an e-mail when the user didn't tell us, we looked at ai_canonname field in struct addrinfo without making sure it is not NULL first.
"git worktree", even though it used the default_abbrev setting that ought to be affected by core.abbrev configuration variable, ignored the variable setting. The command has been taught to read the default set of configuration variables to correct this.
"git init" tried to record core.worktree in the repository's 'config' file when GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable was set and it was different from where GIT_DIR appears as ".git" at its top, but the logic was faulty when .git is a "gitdir:" file that points at the real place, causing trouble in working trees that are managed by "git worktree". This has been corrected.
Codepaths that read from an on-disk loose object were too loose in validating what they are reading is a proper object file and sometimes read past the data they read from the disk, which has been corrected. H/t to Gustavo Grieco for reporting.
The original command line syntax for "git merge", which was "git merge HEAD ...", has been deprecated for quite some time, and "git gui" was the last in-tree user of the syntax. This is finally fixed, so that we can move forward with the deprecation.
An author name, that spelled a backslash-quoted double quote in the human readable part "My "double quoted" name", was not unquoted correctly while applying a patch from a piece of e-mail.
Doc update to clarify what "log -3 --reverse" does.
Almost everybody uses DEFAULT_ABBREV to refer to the default setting for the abbreviation, but "git blame" peeked into underlying variable bypassing the macro for no good reason.
The "graph" API used in "git log --graph" miscounted the number of output columns consumed so far when drawing a padding line, which has been fixed; this did not affect any existing code as nobody tried to write anything after the padding on such a line, though.
The code that parses the format parameter of for-each-ref command has seen a micro-optimization.
When we started cURL to talk to imap server when a new enough version of cURL library is available, we forgot to explicitly add imap(s):// before the destination. To some folks, that didn't work and the library tried to make HTTP(s) requests instead.
The ./configure script generated from configure.ac was taught how to detect support of SSL by libcurl better.
The command-line completion script (in contrib/) learned to complete "git cmd ^mas" to complete the negative end of reference to "git cmd ^master". (merge 49416ad22a cp/completion-negative-refs later to maint).
The existing "git fetch --depth=" option was hard to use correctly when making the history of an existing shallow clone deeper. A new option, "--deepen=", has been added to make this easier to use. "git clone" also learned "--shallow-since=" and "--shallow-exclude=" options to make it easier to specify "I am interested only in the recent N months worth of history" and "Give me only the history since that version". (merge cccf74e2da nd/shallow-deepen later to maint).
It is a common mistake to say "git blame --reverse OLD path", expecting that the command line is dwimmed as if asking how lines in path in an old revision OLD have survived up to the current commit. (merge e1d09701a4 jc/blame-reverse later to maint).
http.emptyauth configuration is a way to allow an empty username to pass when attempting to authenticate using mechanisms like Kerberos. We took an unspecified (NULL) username and sent ":" (i.e. no username, no password) to CURLOPT_USERPWD, but did not do the same when the username is explicitly set to an empty string.
"git clone" of a local repository can be done at the filesystem level, but the codepath did not check errors while copying and adjusting the file that lists alternate object stores.
Documentation for "git commit" was updated to clarify that "commit -p " adds to the current contents of the index to come up with what to commit.
A stray symbolic link in $GIT_DIR/refs/ directory could make name resolution loop forever, which has been corrected.
The "submodule..path" stored in .gitmodules is never copied to .git/config and such a key in .git/config has no meaning, but the documentation described it and submodule..url next to each other as if both belong to .git/config. This has been fixed.
In a worktree connected to a repository elsewhere, created via "git worktree", "git checkout" attempts to protect users from confusion by refusing to check out a branch that is already checked out in another worktree. However, this also prevented checking out a branch, which is designated as the primary branch of a bare reopsitory, in a worktree that is connected to the bare repository. The check has been corrected to allow it.
"git rebase" immediately after "git clone" failed to find the fork point from the upstream.
When fetching from a remote that has many tags that are irrelevant to branches we are following, we used to waste way too many cycles when checking if the object pointed at by a tag (that we are not going to fetch!) exists in our repository too carefully.
Protect our code from over-eager compilers.
Recent git allows submodule..branch to use a special token "." instead of the branch name; the documentation has been updated to describe it.
A hot-fix for a test added by a recent topic that went to both 'master' and 'maint' already.
"git send-email" attempts to pick up valid e-mails from the trailers, but people in real world write non-addresses there, like "Cc: Stable # 4.8+", which broke the output depending on the availability and vintage of Mail::Address perl module. (merge dcfafc5214 mm/send-email-cc-cruft-after-address later to maint).
The Travis CI configuration we ship ran the tests with --verbose option but this risks non-TAP output that happens to be "ok" to be misinterpreted as TAP signalling a test that passed. This resulted in unnecessary failure. This has been corrected by introducing a new mode to run our tests in the test harness to send the verbose output separately to the log file.
Some AsciiDoc formatter mishandles a displayed illustration with tabs in it. Adjust a few of them in merge-base documentation to work around them.
A minor regression fix for "git submodule" that was introduced when more helper functions were reimplemented in C. (merge 77b63ac31e sb/submodule-ignore-trailing-slash later to maint).
The code that we have used for the past 10+ years to cycle 4-element ring buffers turns out to be not quite portable in theoretical world. (merge bb84735c80 rs/ring-buffer-wraparound later to maint).
"git daemon" used fixed-length buffers to turn URL to the repository the client asked for into the server side directory path, using snprintf() to avoid overflowing these buffers, but allowed possibly truncated paths to the directory. This has been tightened to reject such a request that causes overlong path to be required to serve. (merge 6bdb0083be jk/daemon-path-ok-check-truncation later to maint).
Recent update to git-sh-setup (a library of shell functions that are used by our in-tree scripted Porcelain commands) included another shell library git-sh-i18n without specifying where it is, relying on the $PATH. This has been fixed to be more explicit by prefixing $(git --exec-path) output in front. (merge 1073094f30 ak/sh-setup-dot-source-i18n-fix later to maint).
Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.

New in Git 2.10.2 (Oct 30, 2016)

Fixes since v2.10.1:
The code that parses the format parameter of for-each-ref command has seen a micro-optimization.
The "graph" API used in "git log --graph" miscounted the number of output columns consumed so far when drawing a padding line, which has been fixed; this did not affect any existing code as nobody tried to write anything after the padding on such a line, though.
Almost everybody uses DEFAULT_ABBREV to refer to the default setting for the abbreviation, but "git blame" peeked into underlying variable bypassing the macro for no good reason.
Doc update to clarify what "log -3 --reverse" does.
An author name, that spelled a backslash-quoted double quote in the human readable part "My "double quoted" name", was not unquoted correctly while applying a patch from a piece of e-mail.
The original command line syntax for "git merge", which was "git merge HEAD ...", has been deprecated for quite some time, and "git gui" was the last in-tree user of the syntax. This is finally fixed, so that we can move forward with the deprecation.
Codepaths that read from an on-disk loose object were too loose in validating what they are reading is a proper object file and sometimes read past the data they read from the disk, which has been corrected. H/t to Gustavo Grieco for reporting.
"git worktree", even though it used the default_abbrev setting that ought to be affected by core.abbrev configuration variable, ignored the variable setting. The command has been taught to read the default set of configuration variables to correct this.
A low-level function verify_packfile() was meant to show errors that were detected without dying itself, but under some conditions it didn't and died instead, which has been fixed.
When "git fetch" tries to find where the history of the repository it runs in has diverged from what the other side has, it has a mechanism to avoid digging too deep into irrelevant side branches. This however did not work well over the "smart-http" transport due to a design bug, which has been fixed.
When we started cURL to talk to imap server when a new enough version of cURL library is available, we forgot to explicitly add imap(s):// before the destination. To some folks, that didn't work and the library tried to make HTTP(s) requests instead.
The ./configure script generated from configure.ac was taught how to detect support of SSL by libcurl better.
http.emptyauth configuration is a way to allow an empty username to pass when attempting to authenticate using mechanisms like Kerberos. We took an unspecified (NULL) username and sent ":" (i.e. no username, no password) to CURLOPT_USERPWD, but did not do the same when the username is explicitly set to an empty string.
"git clone" of a local repository can be done at the filesystem level, but the codepath did not check errors while copying and adjusting the file that lists alternate object stores.
Documentation for "git commit" was updated to clarify that "commit -p " adds to the current contents of the index to come up with what to commit.
A stray symbolic link in $GIT_DIR/refs/ directory could make name resolution loop forever, which has been corrected.
The "submodule..path" stored in .gitmodules is never copied to .git/config and such a key in .git/config has no meaning, but the documentation described it and submodule..url next to each other as if both belong to .git/config. This has been fixed.
Recent git allows submodule..branch to use a special token "." instead of the branch name; the documentation has been updated to describe it.
In a worktree connected to a repository elsewhere, created via "git worktree", "git checkout" attempts to protect users from confusion by refusing to check out a branch that is already checked out in another worktree. However, this also prevented checking out a branch, which is designated as the primary branch of a bare reopsitory, in a worktree that is connected to the bare repository. The check has been corrected to allow it.
"git rebase" immediately after "git clone" failed to find the fork point from the upstream.
When fetching from a remote that has many tags that are irrelevant to branches we are following, we used to waste way too many cycles when checking if the object pointed at by a tag (that we are not going to fetch!) exists in our repository too carefully.
The Travis CI configuration we ship ran the tests with --verbose option but this risks non-TAP output that happens to be "ok" to be misinterpreted as TAP signalling a test that passed. This resulted in unnecessary failure. This has been corrected by introducing a new mode to run our tests in the test harness to send the verbose output separately to the log file.
Some AsciiDoc formatter mishandles a displayed illustration with tabs in it. Adjust a few of them in merge-base documentation to work around them.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.10.1 (Oct 4, 2016)

Fixes since v2.10:
Clarify various ways to specify the "revision ranges" in the documentation.
"diff-highlight" script (in contrib/) learned to work better with "git log -p --graph" output.
The test framework left the number of tests and success/failure count in the t/test-results directory, keyed by the name of the test script plus the process ID. The latter however turned out not to serve any useful purpose. The process ID part of the filename has been removed.
Having a submodule whose ".git" repository is somehow corrupt caused a few commands that recurse into submodules loop forever.
"git symbolic-ref -d HEAD" happily removes the symbolic ref, but the resulting repository becomes an invalid one. Teach the command to forbid removal of HEAD.
A test spawned a short-lived background process, which sometimes prevented the test directory from getting removed at the end of the script on some platforms.
Update a few tests that used to use GIT_CURL_VERBOSE to use the newer GIT_TRACE_CURL.
Update Japanese translation for "git-gui".
"git fetch http::/site/path" did not die correctly and segfaulted instead.
"git commit-tree" stopped reading commit.gpgsign configuration variable that was meant for Porcelain "git commit" in Git 2.9; we forgot to update "git gui" to look at the configuration to match this change.
"git log --cherry-pick" used to include merge commits as candidates to be matched up with other commits, resulting a lot of wasted time. The patch-id generation logic has been updated to ignore merges to avoid the wastage.
The http transport (with curl-multi option, which is the default these days) failed to remove curl-easy handle from a curlm session, which led to unnecessary API failures.
"git diff -W" output needs to extend the context backward to include the header line of the current function and also forward to include the body of the entire current function up to the header line of the next one. This process may have to merge to adjacent hunks, but the code forgot to do so in some cases.
Performance tests done via "t/perf" did not use the same set of build configuration if the user relied on autoconf generated configuration.
"git format-patch --base=..." feature that was recently added showed the base commit information after "-- " e-mail signature line, which turned out to be inconvenient. The base information has been moved above the signature line.
Even when "git pull --rebase=preserve" (and the underlying "git rebase --preserve") can complete without creating any new commit (i.e. fast-forwards), it still insisted on having a usable ident information (read: user.email is set correctly), which was less than nice. As the underlying commands used inside "git rebase" would fail with a more meaningful error message and advice text when the bogus ident matters, this extra check was removed.
"git gc --aggressive" used to limit the delta-chain length to 250, which is way too deep for gaining additional space savings and is detrimental for runtime performance. The limit has been reduced to 50.
Documentation for individual configuration variables to control use of color (like `color.grep`) said that their default value is 'false', instead of saying their default is taken from `color.ui`. When we updated the default value for color.ui from 'false' to 'auto' quite a while ago, all of them broke. This has been corrected.
A shell script example in check-ref-format documentation has been fixed.
"git checkout " does not follow the usual disambiguation rules when the can be both a rev and a path, to allow checking out a branch 'foo' in a project that happens to have a file 'foo' in the working tree without having to disambiguate. This was poorly documented and the check was incorrect when the command was run from a subdirectory.
Some codepaths in "git diff" used regexec(3) on a buffer that was mmap(2)ed, which may not have a terminating NUL, leading to a read beyond the end of the mapped region. This was fixed by introducing a regexec_buf() helper that takes a pair with REG_STARTEND extension.
The procedure to build Git on Mac OS X for Travis CI hardcoded the internal directory structure we assumed HomeBrew uses, which was a no-no. The procedure has been updated to ask HomeBrew things we need to know to fix this.
When "git rebase -i" is given a broken instruction, it told the user to fix it with "--edit-todo", but didn't say what the step after that was (i.e. "--continue").
"git add --chmod=+x" added recently lacked documentation, which has been corrected.
"git add --chmod=+x " added recently only toggled the executable bit for paths that are either new or modified. This has been corrected to flip the executable bit for all paths that match the given pathspec.
"git pack-objects --include-tag" was taught that when we know that we are sending an object C, we want a tag B that directly points at C but also a tag A that points at the tag B. We used to miss the intermediate tag B in some cases.
Documentation around tools to import from CVS was fairly outdated.
In the codepath that comes up with the hostname to be used in an e-mail when the user didn't tell us, we looked at ai_canonname field in struct addrinfo without making sure it is not NULL first.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.10.0 (Sep 3, 2016)

BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY NOTES:
UPDATES SINCE V2.9:
UI, Workflows & Features:
"git pull --rebase --verify-signature" learned to warn the user that "--verify-signature" is a no-op when rebasing.
An upstream project can make a recommendation to shallowly clone some submodules in the .gitmodules file it ships.
"git worktree add" learned that '-' can be used as a short-hand for "@{-1}", the previous branch.
Update the funcname definition to support css files.
The completion script (in contrib/) learned to complete "git status" options.
Messages that are generated by auto gc during "git push" on the receiving end are now passed back to the sending end in such a way that they are shown with "remote: " prefix to avoid confusing the users.
"git add -i/-p" learned to honor diff.compactionHeuristic experimental knob, so that the user can work on the same hunk split as "git diff" output.
"upload-pack" allows a custom "git pack-objects" replacement when responding to "fetch/clone" via the uploadpack.packObjectsHook. (merge b738396 jk/upload-pack-hook later to maint).
Teach format-patch and mailsplit (hence "am") how a line that happens to begin with "From " in the e-mail message is quoted with ">", so that these lines can be restored to their original shape. (merge d9925d1 ew/mboxrd-format-am later to maint).
"git repack" learned the "--keep-unreachable" option, which sends loose unreachable objects to a pack instead of leaving them loose. This helps heuristics based on the number of loose objects (e.g. "gc --auto"). (merge e26a8c4 jk/repack-keep-unreachable later to maint).
"log --graph --format=" learned that "%>|(N)" specifies the width relative to the terminal's left edge, not relative to the area to draw text that is to the right of the ancestry-graph section. It also now accepts negative N that means the column limit is relative to the right border.
A careless invocation of "git send-email directory/" after editing 0001-change.patch with an editor often ends up sending both 0001-change.patch and its backup file, 0001-change.patch~, causing embarrassment and a minor confusion. Detect such an input and offer to skip the backup files when sending the patches out. (merge 531220b jc/send-email-skip-backup later to maint).
"git submodule update" that drives many "git clone" could eventually hit flaky servers/network conditions on one of the submodules; the command learned to retry the attempt.
The output coloring scheme learned two new attributes, italic and strike, in addition to existing bold, reverse, etc.
"git log" learns log.showSignature configuration variable, and a command line option "--no-show-signature" to countermand it. (merge fce04c3 mj/log-show-signature-conf later to maint).
More markings of messages for i18n, with updates to various tests to pass GETTEXT_POISON tests.
"git archive" learned to handle files that are larger than 8GB and commits far in the future than expressible by the traditional US-TAR format. (merge 560b0e8 jk/big-and-future-archive-tar later to maint).
A new configuration variable core.sshCommand has been added to specify what value for GIT_SSH_COMMAND to use per repository.
"git worktree prune" protected worktrees that are marked as "locked" by creating a file in a known location. "git worktree" command learned a dedicated command pair to create and remove such a file, so that the users do not have to do this with editor.
A handful of "git svn" updates.
"git push" learned to accept and pass extra options to the receiving end so that hooks can read and react to them.
"git status" learned to suggest "merge --abort" during a conflicted merge, just like it already suggests "rebase --abort" during a conflicted rebase.
"git jump" script (in contrib/) has been updated a bit. (merge a91e692 jk/git-jump later to maint).
"git push" and "git clone" learned to give better progress meters to the end user who is waiting on the terminal.
An entry "git log --decorate" for the tip of the current branch is shown as "HEAD -> name" (where "name" is the name of the branch); the arrow is now painted in the same color as "HEAD", not in the color for commits.
"git format-patch" learned format.from configuration variable to specify the default settings for its "--from" option.
"git am -3" calls "git merge-recursive" when it needs to fall back to a three-way merge; this call has been turned into an internal subroutine call instead of spawning a separate subprocess.
The command line completion scripts (in contrib/) now knows about "git branch --delete/--move [--remote]". (merge 2703c22 vs/completion-branch-fully-spelled-d-m-r later to maint).
"git rev-parse --git-path hooks/" learned to take core.hooksPath configuration variable (introduced during 2.9 cycle) into account. (merge 9445b49 ab/hooks later to maint).
"git log --show-signature" and other commands that display the verification status of PGP signature now shows the longer key-id, as 32-bit key-id is so last century.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
"git fast-import" learned the same performance trick to avoid creating too small a packfile as "git fetch" and "git push" have, using *.unpackLimit configuration.
When "git daemon" is run without --[init-]timeout specified, a connection from a client that silently goes offline can hang around for a long time, wasting resources. The socket-level KEEPALIVE has been enabled to allow the OS to notice such failed connections.
"git upload-pack" command has been updated to use the parse-options API.
The "git apply" standalone program is being libified; the first step to move many state variables into a structure that can be explicitly (re)initialized to make the machinery callable more than once has been merged.
HTTP transport gained an option to produce more detailed debugging trace. (merge 73e57aa ep/http-curl-trace later to maint).
Instead of taking advantage of the fact that a struct string_list that is allocated with all NULs happens to be the INIT_NODUP kind, the users of string_list structures are taught to initialize them explicitly as such, to document their behaviour better. (merge 2721ce2 jk/string-list-static-init later to maint).
HTTPd tests learned to show the server error log to help diagnosing a failing tests. (merge 44f243d nd/test-lib-httpd-show-error-log-in-verbose later to maint).
The ownership rule for the piece of memory that hold references to be fetched in "git fetch" was screwy, which has been cleaned up.
"git bisect" makes an internal call to "git diff-tree" when bisection finds the culprit, but this call did not initialize the data structure to pass to the diff-tree API correctly.
Further preparatory clean-up for "worktree" feature continues. (merge 0409e0b nd/worktree-cleanup-post-head-protection later to maint).
Formats of the various data (and how to validate them) where we use GPG signature have been documented.
A new run-command API function pipe_command() is introduced to sanely feed data to the standard input while capturing data from the standard output and the standard error of an external process, which is cumbersome to hand-roll correctly without deadlocking.
The codepath to sign data in a prepared buffer with GPG has been updated to use this API to read from the status-fd to check for errors (instead of relying on GPG's exit status). (merge efee955 jk/gpg-interface-cleanup later to maint).
Allow t/perf framework to use the features from the most recent version of Git even when testing an older installed version.
The commands in the "log/diff" family have had an FILE* pointer in the data structure they pass around for a long time, but some codepaths used to always write to the standard output. As a preparatory step to make "git format-patch" available to the internal callers, these codepaths have been updated to consistently write into that FILE* instead.
Conversion from unsigned char sha1[20] to struct object_id continues.
Improve the look of the way "git fetch" reports what happened to each ref that was fetched.
The .c/.h sources are marked as such in our .gitattributes file so that "git diff -W" and friends would work better.
Code clean-up to avoid using a variable string that compilers may feel untrustable as printf-style format given to write_file() helper function.
"git p4" used a location outside $GIT_DIR/refs/ to place its temporary branches, which has been moved to refs/git-p4-tmp/.
Existing autoconf generated test for the need to link with pthread library did not check all the functions from pthread libraries; recent FreeBSD has some functions in libc but not others, and we mistakenly thought linking with libc is enough when it is not.
When "git fsck" reports a broken link (e.g. a tree object contains a blob that does not exist), both containing object and the object that is referred to were reported with their 40-hex object names. The command learned the "--name-objects" option to show the path to the containing object from existing refs (e.g. "HEAD~24^2:file.txt").
Allow http daemon tests in Travis CI tests.
Makefile assumed that -lrt is always available on platforms that want to use clock_gettime() and CLOCK_MONOTONIC, which is not a case for recent Mac OS X. The necessary symbols are often found in libc on many modern systems and having -lrt on the command line, as long as the library exists, had no effect, but when the platform removes librt.a that is a different matter--having -lrt will break the linkage.
This change could be seen as a regression for those who do need to specify -lrt, as they now specifically ask for NEEDS_LIBRT when building. Hopefully they are in the minority these days.
Further preparatory work on the refs API before the pluggable backend series can land.
Error handling in the codepaths that updates refs has been improved.
The API to iterate over all the refs (i.e. for_each_ref(), etc.) has been revamped.
The handling of the "text=auto" attribute has been corrected. $ echo "* text=auto eol=crlf" >.gitattributes used to have the same effect as $ echo "* text eol=crlf" >.gitattributes i.e. declaring all files are text (ignoring "auto"). The combination has been fixed to be equivalent to doing $ git config core.autocrlf true
Documentation has been updated to show better example usage of the updated "text=auto" attribute.
A few tests that specifically target "git rebase -i" have been added.
Dumb http transport on the client side has been optimized. (merge ecba195 ew/http-walker later to maint).
Users of the parse_options_concat() API function need to allocate extra slots in advance and fill them with OPT_END() when they want to decide the set of supported options dynamically, which makes the code error-prone and hard to read. This has been corrected by tweaking the API to allocate and return a new copy of "struct option" array.
"git fetch" exchanges batched have/ack messages between the sender and the receiver, initially doubling every time and then falling back to enlarge the window size linearly. The "smart http" transport, being an half-duplex protocol, outgrows the preset limit too quickly and becomes inefficient when interacting with a large repository. The internal mechanism learned to grow the window size more aggressively when working with the "smart http" transport.
Tests for "git svn" have been taught to reuse the lib-httpd test infrastructure when testing the subversion integration that interacts with subversion repositories served over the http:// protocol. (merge a8a5d25 ew/git-svn-http-tests later to maint).
"git pack-objects" has a few options that tell it not to pack objects found in certain packfiles, which require it to scan .idx files of all available packs. The codepaths involved in these operations have been optimized for a common case of not having any non-local pack and/or any .kept pack.
The t3700 test about "add --chmod=-x" have been made a bit more robust and generally cleaned up. (merge 766cdc4 ib/t3700-add-chmod-x-updates later to maint).
The build procedure learned PAGER_ENV knob that lists what default environment variable settings to export for popular pagers. This mechanism is used to tweak the default settings to MORE on FreeBSD. (merge 995bc22 ew/build-time-pager-tweaks later to maint).
The http-backend (the server-side component of smart-http transport) used to trickle the HTTP header one at a time. Now these write(2)s are batched. (merge b36045c ew/http-backend-batch-headers later to maint).
When "git rebase" tries to compare set of changes on the updated upstream and our own branch, it computes patch-id for all of these changes and attempts to find matches. This has been optimized by lazily computing the full patch-id (which is expensive) to be compared only for changes that touch the same set of paths. (merge ba67504 kw/patch-ids-optim later to maint).
A handful of tests that were broken under gettext-poison build have been fixed.
The recent i18n patch we added during this cycle did a bit too much refactoring of the messages to avoid word-legos; the repetition has been reduced to help translators.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.9:
The commands in `git log` family take %C(auto) in a custom format string. This unconditionally turned the color on, ignoring --no-color or with --color=auto when the output is not connected to a tty; this was corrected to make the format truly behave as "auto".
"git rev-list --count" whose walk-length is limited with "-n" option did not work well with the counting optimized to look at the bitmap index.
"git show -W" (extend hunks to cover the entire function, delimited by lines that match the "funcname" pattern) used to show the entire file when a change added an entire function at the end of the file, which has been fixed.
The documentation set has been updated so that literal commands, configuration variables and environment variables are consistently typeset in fixed-width font and bold in manpages.
"git svn propset" subcommand that was added in 2.3 days is documented now.
The documentation tries to consistently spell "GPG"; when referring to the specific program name, "gpg" is used.
"git reflog" stopped upon seeing an entry that denotes a branch creation event (aka "unborn"), which made it appear as if the reflog was truncated.
The git-prompt scriptlet (in contrib/) was not friendly with those who uses "set -u", which has been fixed.
compat/regex code did not cleanly compile.
A codepath that used alloca(3) to place an unbounded amount of data on the stack has been updated to avoid doing so.
"git update-index --add --chmod=+x file" may be usable as an escape hatch, but not a friendly thing to force for people who do need to use it regularly. "git add --chmod=+x file" can be used instead.
Build improvements for gnome-keyring (in contrib/)
"git status" used to say "working directory" when it meant "working tree".
Comments about misbehaving FreeBSD shells have been clarified with the version number (9.x and before are broken, newer ones are OK).
"git cherry-pick A" worked on an unborn branch, but "git cherry-pick A..B" didn't.
Fix an unintended regression in v2.9 that breaks "clone --depth" that recurses down to submodules by forcing the submodules to also be cloned shallowly, which many server instances that host upstream of the submodules are not prepared for.
Fix unnecessarily waste in the idiomatic use of ': ${VAR=default}' to set the default value, without enclosing it in double quotes.
Some platform-specific code had non-ANSI strict declarations of C functions that do not take any parameters, which has been corrected.
The internal code used to show local timezone offset is not prepared to handle timestamps beyond year 2100, and gave a bogus offset value to the caller. Use a more benign looking +0000 instead and let "git log" going in such a case, instead of aborting.
One among four invocations of readlink(1) in our test suite has been rewritten so that the test can run on systems without the command (others are in valgrind test framework and t9802).
t/perf needs /usr/bin/time with GNU extension; the invocation of it is updated to "gtime" on Darwin.
A bug, which caused "git p4" while running under verbose mode to report paths that are omitted due to branch prefix incorrectly, has been fixed; the command said "Ignoring file outside of prefix" for paths that are _inside_.
The top level documentation "git help git" still pointed at the documentation set hosted at now-defunct google-code repository. Update it to point to https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html instead.
A helper function that takes the contents of a commit object and finds its subject line did not ignore leading blank lines, as is commonly done by other codepaths. Make it ignore leading blank lines to match.
For a long time, we carried an in-code comment that said our colored output would work only when we use fprintf/fputs on Windows, which no longer is the case for the past few years.
"gc.autoPackLimit" when set to 1 should not trigger a repacking when there is only one pack, but the code counted poorly and did so.
Add a test to specify the desired behaviour that currently is not available in "git rebase -Xsubtree=...".
More mark-up updates to typeset strings that are expected to literally typed by the end user in fixed-width font.
"git commit --amend --allow-empty-message -S" for a commit without any message body could have misidentified where the header of the commit object ends.
"git rebase -i --autostash" did not restore the auto-stashed change when the operation was aborted.
Git does not know what the contents in the index should be for a path added with "git add -N" yet, so "git grep --cached" should not show hits (or show lack of hits, with -L) in such a path, but that logic does not apply to "git grep", i.e. searching in the working tree files. But we did so by mistake, which has been corrected.
"git blame -M" missed a single line that was moved within the file.
Fix recently introduced codepaths that are involved in parallel submodule operations, which gave up on reading too early, and could have wasted CPU while attempting to write under a corner case condition.
"git grep -i" has been taught to fold case in non-ascii locales correctly.
A test that unconditionally used "mktemp" learned that the command is not necessarily available everywhere.
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. (merge de61ceb jk/common-main later to maint).
The test framework learned a new helper test_match_signal to check an exit code from getting killed by an expected signal.
General code clean-up around a helper function to write a single-liner to a file. (merge 7eb6e10 jk/write-file later to maint).
One part of "git am" had an oddball helper function that called stuff from outside "his" as opposed to calling what we have "ours", which was not gender-neutral and also inconsistent with the rest of the system where outside stuff is usuall called "theirs" in contrast to "ours".
"git blame file" allowed the lineage of lines in the uncommitted, unadded contents of "file" to be inspected, but it refused when "file" did not appear in the current commit. When "file" was created by renaming an existing file (but the change has not been committed), this restriction was unnecessarily tight.
"git add -N dir/file && git write-tree" produced an incorrect tree when there are other paths in the same directory that sorts after "file".
"git fetch http://user:pass@host/repo..." scrubbed the userinfo part, but "git push" didn't.
"git merge" with renormalization did not work well with merge-recursive, due to "safer crlf" conversion kicking in when it shouldn't. (merge 1335d76 jc/renormalize-merge-kill-safer-crlf later to maint).
The use of strbuf in "git rm" to build filename to remove was a bit suboptimal, which has been fixed.
An age old bug that caused "git diff --ignore-space-at-eol" misbehave has been fixed.
"git notes merge" had a code to see if a path exists (and fails if it does) and then open the path for writing (when it doesn't). Replace it with open with O_EXCL.
"git pack-objects" and "git index-pack" mostly operate with off_t when talking about the offset of objects in a packfile, but there were a handful of places that used "unsigned long" to hold that value, leading to an unintended truncation.
Recent update to "git daemon" tries to enable the socket-level KEEPALIVE, but when it is spawned via inetd, the standard input file descriptor may not necessarily be connected to a socket. Suppress an ENOTSOCK error from setsockopt().
Recent FreeBSD stopped making perl available at /usr/bin/perl; switch the default the built-in path to /usr/local/bin/perl on not too ancient FreeBSD releases.
"git commit --help" said "--no-verify" is only about skipping the pre-commit hook, and failed to say that it also skipped the commit-msg hook.
"git merge" in Git v2.9 was taught to forbid merging an unrelated lines of history by default, but that is exactly the kind of thing the "--rejoin" mode of "git subtree" (in contrib/) wants to do. "git subtree" has been taught to use the "--allow-unrelated-histories" option to override the default.
The build procedure for "git persistent-https" helper (in contrib/) has been updated so that it can be built with more recent versions of Go.
There is an optimization used in "git diff $treeA $treeB" to borrow an already checked-out copy in the working tree when it is known to be the same as the blob being compared, expecting that open/mmap of such a file is faster than reading it from the object store, which involves inflating and applying delta. This however kicked in even when the checked-out copy needs to go through the convert-to-git conversion (including the clean filter), which defeats the whole point of the optimization. The optimization has been disabled when the conversion is necessary.
"git -c grep.patternType=extended log --basic-regexp" misbehaved because the internal API to access the grep machinery was not designed well.
Windows port was failing some tests in t4130, due to the lack of inum in the returned values by its lstat(2) emulation.
The reflog output format is documented better, and a new format --date=unix to report the seconds-since-epoch (without timezone) has been added. (merge 442f6fd jk/reflog-date later to maint).
"git difftool ..." started in a subdirectory failed to interpret the paths relative to that directory, which has been fixed.
The characters in the label shown for tags/refs for commits in "gitweb" output are now properly escaped for proper HTML output.
FreeBSD can lie when asked mtime of a directory, which made the untracked cache code to fall back to a slow-path, which in turn caused tests in t7063 to fail because it wanted to verify the behaviour of the fast-path.
Squelch compiler warnings for nedmalloc (in compat/) library.
A small memory leak in the command line parsing of "git blame" has been plugged.
The API documentation for hashmap was unclear if hashmap_entry can be safely discarded without any other consideration. State that it is safe to do so.
Not-so-recent rewrite of "git am" that started making internal calls into the commit machinery had an unintended regression, in that no matter how many seconds it took to apply many patches, the resulting committer timestamp for the resulting commits were all the same.
"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. (merge 9eed4f3 jk/push-force-with-lease-creation later to maint).
The mechanism to limit the pack window memory size, when packing is done using multiple threads (which is the default), is per-thread, but this was not documented clearly. (merge 954176c ms/document-pack-window-memory-is-per-thread later to maint).
"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. (merge 04e0869 js/import-tars-hardlinks later to maint).
"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 '/'. (merge 189d035 js/mv-dir-to-new-directory later to maint).
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). (merge c2cafd3 js/test-lint-pathname later to maint).
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. (merge 5447a76 rs/pull-signed-tag later to maint).
"git checkout --detach " used to give the same advice message as that is issued when "git checkout " (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. (merge 779b88a sb/checkout-explit-detach-no-advice later to maint).
"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. (merge 45a4f5d jk/difftool-command-not-found later to maint).
On Windows, help.browser configuration variable used to be ignored, which has been corrected. (merge 6db5967 js/no-html-bypass-on-windows later to maint).
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?" (merge ae1f709 dg/document-git-c-in-git-config-doc later to maint).
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). (merge 05d1ed6 bw/mingw-avoid-inheriting-fd-to-lockfile later to maint).
Correct an age-old calco (is that a typo-like word for calc) in the documentation.
Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates.

New in Git 2.10 RC 2 (Aug 29, 2016)

UPDATES SINCE V2.9:
UI, Workflows & Features:
"git pull --rebase --verify-signature" learned to warn the user that "--verify-signature" is a no-op when rebasing.
An upstream project can make a recommendation to shallowly clone some submodules in the .gitmodules file it ships.
"git worktree add" learned that '-' can be used as a short-hand for "@{-1}", the previous branch.
Update the funcname definition to support css files.
The completion script (in contrib/) learned to complete "git status" options.
Messages that are generated by auto gc during "git push" on the receiving end are now passed back to the sending end in such a way that they are shown with "remote: " prefix to avoid confusing the users.
"git add -i/-p" learned to honor diff.compactionHeuristic experimental knob, so that the user can work on the same hunk split as "git diff" output.
"upload-pack" allows a custom "git pack-objects" replacement when responding to "fetch/clone" via the uploadpack.packObjectsHook. (merge b738396 jk/upload-pack-hook later to maint).
Teach format-patch and mailsplit (hence "am") how a line that happens to begin with "From " in the e-mail message is quoted with ">", so that these lines can be restored to their original shape. (merge d9925d1 ew/mboxrd-format-am later to maint).
"git repack" learned the "--keep-unreachable" option, which sends loose unreachable objects to a pack instead of leaving them loose. This helps heuristics based on the number of loose objects (e.g. "gc --auto"). (merge e26a8c4 jk/repack-keep-unreachable later to maint).
"log --graph --format=" learned that "%>|(N)" specifies the width relative to the terminal's left edge, not relative to the area to draw text that is to the right of the ancestry-graph section. It also now accepts negative N that means the column limit is relative to the right border.
A careless invocation of "git send-email directory/" after editing 0001-change.patch with an editor often ends up sending both 0001-change.patch and its backup file, 0001-change.patch~, causing embarrassment and a minor confusion. Detect such an input and offer to skip the backup files when sending the patches out. (merge 531220b jc/send-email-skip-backup later to maint).
"git submodule update" that drives many "git clone" could eventually hit flaky servers/network conditions on one of the submodules; the command learned to retry the attempt.
The output coloring scheme learned two new attributes, italic and strike, in addition to existing bold, reverse, etc.
"git log" learns log.showSignature configuration variable, and a command line option "--no-show-signature" to countermand it. (merge fce04c3 mj/log-show-signature-conf later to maint).
More markings of messages for i18n, with updates to various tests to pass GETTEXT_POISON tests.
"git archive" learned to handle files that are larger than 8GB and commits far in the future than expressible by the traditional US-TAR format. (merge 5caeeb8 jk/big-and-future-archive-tar later to maint).
A new configuration variable core.sshCommand has been added to specify what value for GIT_SSH_COMMAND to use per repository.
"git worktree prune" protected worktrees that are marked as "locked" by creating a file in a known location. "git worktree" command learned a dedicated command pair to create and remove such a file, so that the users do not have to do this with editor.
A handful of "git svn" updates.
"git push" learned to accept and pass extra options to the receiving end so that hooks can read and react to them.
"git status" learned to suggest "merge --abort" during a conflicted merge, just like it already suggests "rebase --abort" during a conflicted rebase.
"git jump" script (in contrib/) has been updated a bit. (merge a91e692 jk/git-jump later to maint).
"git push" and "git clone" learned to give better progress meters to the end user who is waiting on the terminal.
An entry "git log --decorate" for the tip of the current branch is shown as "HEAD -> name" (where "name" is the name of the branch); the arrow is now painted in the same color as "HEAD", not in the color for commits.
"git format-patch" learned format.from configuration variable to specify the default settings for its "--from" option.
"git am -3" calls "git merge-recursive" when it needs to fall back to a three-way merge; this call has been turned into an internal subroutine call instead of spawning a separate subprocess.
The command line completion scripts (in contrib/) now knows about "git branch --delete/--move [--remote]". (merge 2703c22 vs/completion-branch-fully-spelled-d-m-r later to maint).
"git rev-parse --git-path hooks/" learned to take core.hooksPath configuration variable (introduced during 2.9 cycle) into account. (merge 9445b49 ab/hooks later to maint).
"git log --show-signature" and other commands that display the verification status of PGP signature now shows the longer key-id, as 32-bit key-id is so last century.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
"git fast-import" learned the same performance trick to avoid creating too small a packfile as "git fetch" and "git push" have, using *.unpackLimit configuration.
When "git daemon" is run without --[init-]timeout specified, a connection from a client that silently goes offline can hang around for a long time, wasting resources. The socket-level KEEPALIVE has been enabled to allow the OS to notice such failed connections.
"git upload-pack" command has been updated to use the parse-options API.
The "git apply" standalone program is being libified; the first step to move many state variables into a structure that can be explicitly (re)initialized to make the machinery callable more than once has been merged.
HTTP transport gained an option to produce more detailed debugging trace. (merge 73e57aa ep/http-curl-trace later to maint).
Instead of taking advantage of the fact that a struct string_list that is allocated with all NULs happens to be the INIT_NODUP kind, the users of string_list structures are taught to initialize them explicitly as such, to document their behaviour better. (merge 2721ce2 jk/string-list-static-init later to maint).
HTTPd tests learned to show the server error log to help diagnosing a failing tests. (merge 44f243d nd/test-lib-httpd-show-error-log-in-verbose later to maint).
The ownership rule for the piece of memory that hold references to be fetched in "git fetch" was screwy, which has been cleaned up.
"git bisect" makes an internal call to "git diff-tree" when bisection finds the culprit, but this call did not initialize the data structure to pass to the diff-tree API correctly.
Further preparatory clean-up for "worktree" feature continues. (merge 0409e0b nd/worktree-cleanup-post-head-protection later to maint).
Formats of the various data (and how to validate them) where we use GPG signature have been documented.
A new run-command API function pipe_command() is introduced to sanely feed data to the standard input while capturing data from the standard output and the standard error of an external process, which is cumbersome to hand-roll correctly without deadlocking.
The codepath to sign data in a prepared buffer with GPG has been updated to use this API to read from the status-fd to check for errors (instead of relying on GPG's exit status). (merge efee955 jk/gpg-interface-cleanup later to maint).
Allow t/perf framework to use the features from the most recent version of Git even when testing an older installed version.
The commands in the "log/diff" family have had an FILE* pointer in the data structure they pass around for a long time, but some codepaths used to always write to the standard output. As a preparatory step to make "git format-patch" available to the internal callers, these codepaths have been updated to consistently write into that FILE* instead.
Conversion from unsigned char sha1[20] to struct object_id continues.
Improve the look of the way "git fetch" reports what happened to each ref that was fetched.
The .c/.h sources are marked as such in our .gitattributes file so that "git diff -W" and friends would work better.
Code clean-up to avoid using a variable string that compilers may feel untrustable as printf-style format given to write_file() helper function.
"git p4" used a location outside $GIT_DIR/refs/ to place its temporary branches, which has been moved to refs/git-p4-tmp/.
Existing autoconf generated test for the need to link with pthread library did not check all the functions from pthread libraries; recent FreeBSD has some functions in libc but not others, and we mistakenly thought linking with libc is enough when it is not.
When "git fsck" reports a broken link (e.g. a tree object contains a blob that does not exist), both containing object and the object that is referred to were reported with their 40-hex object names. The command learned the "--name-objects" option to show the path to the containing object from existing refs (e.g. "HEAD~24^2:file.txt").
Allow http daemon tests in Travis CI tests.
Makefile assumed that -lrt is always available on platforms that want to use clock_gettime() and CLOCK_MONOTONIC, which is not a case for recent Mac OS X. The necessary symbols are often found in libc on many modern systems and having -lrt on the command line, as long as the library exists, had no effect, but when the platform removes librt.a that is a different matter--having -lrt will break the linkage.
This change could be seen as a regression for those who do need to specify -lrt, as they now specifically ask for NEEDS_LIBRT when building. Hopefully they are in the minority these days.
Further preparatory work on the refs API before the pluggable backend series can land.
Error handling in the codepaths that updates refs has been improved.
The API to iterate over all the refs (i.e. for_each_ref(), etc.) has been revamped.
The handling of the "text=auto" attribute has been corrected. $ echo "* text=auto eol=crlf" >.gitattributes used to have the same effect as $ echo "* text eol=crlf" >.gitattributes i.e. declaring all files are text (ignoring "auto"). The combination has been fixed to be equivalent to doing $ git config core.autocrlf true
Documentation has been updated to show better example usage of the updated "text=auto" attribute.
A few tests that specifically target "git rebase -i" have been added.
Dumb http transport on the client side has been optimized. (merge ecba195 ew/http-walker later to maint).
Users of the parse_options_concat() API function need to allocate extra slots in advance and fill them with OPT_END() when they want to decide the set of supported options dynamically, which makes the code error-prone and hard to read. This has been corrected by tweaking the API to allocate and return a new copy of "struct option" array.
"git fetch" exchanges batched have/ack messages between the sender and the receiver, initially doubling every time and then falling back to enlarge the window size linearly. The "smart http" transport, being an half-duplex protocol, outgrows the preset limit too quickly and becomes inefficient when interacting with a large repository. The internal mechanism learned to grow the window size more aggressively when working with the "smart http" transport.
Tests for "git svn" have been taught to reuse the lib-httpd test infrastructure when testing the subversion integration that interacts with subversion repositories served over the http:// protocol. (merge a8a5d25 ew/git-svn-http-tests later to maint).
"git pack-objects" has a few options that tell it not to pack objects found in certain packfiles, which require it to scan .idx files of all available packs. The codepaths involved in these operations have been optimized for a common case of not having any non-local pack and/or any .kept pack.
The t3700 test about "add --chmod=-x" have been made a bit more robust and generally cleaned up. (merge 766cdc4 ib/t3700-add-chmod-x-updates later to maint).
The build procedure learned PAGER_ENV knob that lists what default environment variable settings to export for popular pagers. This mechanism is used to tweak the default settings to MORE on FreeBSD. (merge 995bc22 ew/build-time-pager-tweaks later to maint).
The http-backend (the server-side component of smart-http transport) used to trickle the HTTP header one at a time. Now these write(2)s are batched. (merge b36045c ew/http-backend-batch-headers later to maint).
When "git rebase" tries to compare set of changes on the updated upstream and our own branch, it computes patch-id for all of these changes and attempts to find matches. This has been optimized by lazily computing the full patch-id (which is expensive) to be compared only for changes that touch the same set of paths. (merge b3dfeeb kw/patch-ids-optim later to maint).
A handful of tests that were broken under gettext-poison build have been fixed.
The recent i18n patch we added during this cycle did a bit too much refactoring of the messages to avoid word-legos; the repetition has been reduced to help translators.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.9:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.8 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).
The commands in `git log` family take %C(auto) in a custom format string. This unconditionally turned the color on, ignoring --no-color or with --color=auto when the output is not connected to a tty; this was corrected to make the format truly behave as "auto".
"git rev-list --count" whose walk-length is limited with "-n" option did not work well with the counting optimized to look at the bitmap index.
"git show -W" (extend hunks to cover the entire function, delimited by lines that match the "funcname" pattern) used to show the entire file when a change added an entire function at the end of the file, which has been fixed.
The documentation set has been updated so that literal commands, configuration variables and environment variables are consistently typeset in fixed-width font and bold in manpages.
"git svn propset" subcommand that was added in 2.3 days is documented now.
The documentation tries to consistently spell "GPG"; when referring to the specific program name, "gpg" is used.
"git reflog" stopped upon seeing an entry that denotes a branch creation event (aka "unborn"), which made it appear as if the reflog was truncated.
The git-prompt scriptlet (in contrib/) was not friendly with those who uses "set -u", which has been fixed.
compat/regex code did not cleanly compile.
A codepath that used alloca(3) to place an unbounded amount of data on the stack has been updated to avoid doing so.
"git update-index --add --chmod=+x file" may be usable as an escape hatch, but not a friendly thing to force for people who do need to use it regularly. "git add --chmod=+x file" can be used instead.
Build improvements for gnome-keyring (in contrib/)
"git status" used to say "working directory" when it meant "working tree".
Comments about misbehaving FreeBSD shells have been clarified with the version number (9.x and before are broken, newer ones are OK).
"git cherry-pick A" worked on an unborn branch, but "git cherry-pick A..B" didn't.
Fix an unintended regression in v2.9 that breaks "clone --depth" that recurses down to submodules by forcing the submodules to also be cloned shallowly, which many server instances that host upstream of the submodules are not prepared for.
Fix unnecessarily waste in the idiomatic use of ': ${VAR=default}' to set the default value, without enclosing it in double quotes.
Some platform-specific code had non-ANSI strict declarations of C functions that do not take any parameters, which has been corrected.
The internal code used to show local timezone offset is not prepared to handle timestamps beyond year 2100, and gave a bogus offset value to the caller. Use a more benign looking +0000 instead and let "git log" going in such a case, instead of aborting.
One among four invocations of readlink(1) in our test suite has been rewritten so that the test can run on systems without the command (others are in valgrind test framework and t9802).
t/perf needs /usr/bin/time with GNU extension; the invocation of it is updated to "gtime" on Darwin.
A bug, which caused "git p4" while running under verbose mode to report paths that are omitted due to branch prefix incorrectly, has been fixed; the command said "Ignoring file outside of prefix" for paths that are _inside_.
The top level documentation "git help git" still pointed at the documentation set hosted at now-defunct google-code repository. Update it to point to https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html instead.
A helper function that takes the contents of a commit object and finds its subject line did not ignore leading blank lines, as is commonly done by other codepaths. Make it ignore leading blank lines to match.
For a long time, we carried an in-code comment that said our colored output would work only when we use fprintf/fputs on Windows, which no longer is the case for the past few years.
"gc.autoPackLimit" when set to 1 should not trigger a repacking when there is only one pack, but the code counted poorly and did so.
Add a test to specify the desired behaviour that currently is not available in "git rebase -Xsubtree=...".
More mark-up updates to typeset strings that are expected to literally typed by the end user in fixed-width font.
"git commit --amend --allow-empty-message -S" for a commit without any message body could have misidentified where the header of the commit object ends.
"git rebase -i --autostash" did not restore the auto-stashed change when the operation was aborted.
Git does not know what the contents in the index should be for a path added with "git add -N" yet, so "git grep --cached" should not show hits (or show lack of hits, with -L) in such a path, but that logic does not apply to "git grep", i.e. searching in the working tree files. But we did so by mistake, which has been corrected.
"git blame -M" missed a single line that was moved within the file.
Fix recently introduced codepaths that are involved in parallel submodule operations, which gave up on reading too early, and could have wasted CPU while attempting to write under a corner case condition.
"git grep -i" has been taught to fold case in non-ascii locales correctly.
A test that unconditionally used "mktemp" learned that the command is not necessarily available everywhere.
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. (merge de61ceb jk/common-main later to maint).
The test framework learned a new helper test_match_signal to check an exit code from getting killed by an expected signal.
General code clean-up around a helper function to write a single-liner to a file. (merge 7eb6e10 jk/write-file later to maint).
One part of "git am" had an oddball helper function that called stuff from outside "his" as opposed to calling what we have "ours", which was not gender-neutral and also inconsistent with the rest of the system where outside stuff is usuall called "theirs" in contrast to "ours".
"git blame file" allowed the lineage of lines in the uncommitted, unadded contents of "file" to be inspected, but it refused when "file" did not appear in the current commit. When "file" was created by renaming an existing file (but the change has not been committed), this restriction was unnecessarily tight.
"git add -N dir/file && git write-tree" produced an incorrect tree when there are other paths in the same directory that sorts after "file".
"git fetch http://user:pass@host/repo..." scrubbed the userinfo part, but "git push" didn't.
"git merge" with renormalization did not work well with merge-recursive, due to "safer crlf" conversion kicking in when it shouldn't. (merge 1335d76 jc/renormalize-merge-kill-safer-crlf later to maint).
The use of strbuf in "git rm" to build filename to remove was a bit suboptimal, which has been fixed.
An age old bug that caused "git diff --ignore-space-at-eol" misbehave has been fixed.
"git notes merge" had a code to see if a path exists (and fails if it does) and then open the path for writing (when it doesn't). Replace it with open with O_EXCL.
"git pack-objects" and "git index-pack" mostly operate with off_t when talking about the offset of objects in a packfile, but there were a handful of places that used "unsigned long" to hold that value, leading to an unintended truncation.
Recent update to "git daemon" tries to enable the socket-level KEEPALIVE, but when it is spawned via inetd, the standard input file descriptor may not necessarily be connected to a socket. Suppress an ENOTSOCK error from setsockopt().
Recent FreeBSD stopped making perl available at /usr/bin/perl; switch the default the built-in path to /usr/local/bin/perl on not too ancient FreeBSD releases.
"git commit --help" said "--no-verify" is only about skipping the pre-commit hook, and failed to say that it also skipped the commit-msg hook.
"git merge" in Git v2.9 was taught to forbid merging an unrelated lines of history by default, but that is exactly the kind of thing the "--rejoin" mode of "git subtree" (in contrib/) wants to do. "git subtree" has been taught to use the "--allow-unrelated-histories" option to override the default.
The build procedure for "git persistent-https" helper (in contrib/) has been updated so that it can be built with more recent versions of Go.
There is an optimization used in "git diff $treeA $treeB" to borrow an already checked-out copy in the working tree when it is known to be the same as the blob being compared, expecting that open/mmap of such a file is faster than reading it from the object store, which involves inflating and applying delta. This however kicked in even when the checked-out copy needs to go through the convert-to-git conversion (including the clean filter), which defeats the whole point of the optimization. The optimization has been disabled when the conversion is necessary.
"git -c grep.patternType=extended log --basic-regexp" misbehaved because the internal API to access the grep machinery was not designed well.
Windows port was failing some tests in t4130, due to the lack of inum in the returned values by its lstat(2) emulation.
The reflog output format is documented better, and a new format --date=unix to report the seconds-since-epoch (without timezone) has been added. (merge 442f6fd jk/reflog-date later to maint).
"git difftool ..." started in a subdirectory failed to interpret the paths relative to that directory, which has been fixed.
The characters in the label shown for tags/refs for commits in "gitweb" output are now properly escaped for proper HTML output.
FreeBSD can lie when asked mtime of a directory, which made the untracked cache code to fall back to a slow-path, which in turn caused tests in t7063 to fail because it wanted to verify the behaviour of the fast-path.
Squelch compiler warnings for nedmalloc (in compat/) library.
A small memory leak in the command line parsing of "git blame" has been plugged.
The API documentation for hashmap was unclear if hashmap_entry can be safely discarded without any other consideration. State that it is safe to do so.
Not-so-recent rewrite of "git am" that started making internal calls into the commit machinery had an unintended regression, in that no matter how many seconds it took to apply many patches, the resulting committer timestamp for the resulting commits were all the same.
"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. (merge 9eed4f3 jk/push-force-with-lease-creation later to maint).
The mechanism to limit the pack window memory size, when packing is done using multiple threads (which is the default), is per-thread, but this was not documented clearly. (merge 954176c ms/document-pack-window-memory-is-per-thread later to maint).
"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. (merge 04e0869 js/import-tars-hardlinks later to maint).
"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 '/'. (merge 189d035 js/mv-dir-to-new-directory later to maint).
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). (merge c2cafd3 js/test-lint-pathname later to maint).
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. (merge 5447a76 rs/pull-signed-tag later to maint).
"git checkout --detach " used to give the same advice message as that is issued when "git checkout " (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. (merge 779b88a sb/checkout-explit-detach-no-advice later to maint).
"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. (merge 45a4f5d jk/difftool-command-not-found later to maint).
On Windows, help.browser configuration variable used to be ignored, which has been corrected. (merge 6db5967 js/no-html-bypass-on-windows later to maint).
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?" (merge ae1f709 dg/document-git-c-in-git-config-doc later to maint).
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). (merge 05d1ed6 bw/mingw-avoid-inheriting-fd-to-lockfile later to maint).
Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates.

New in Git 2.9.3 (Aug 13, 2016)

Fixes since v2.9.2:
A helper function that takes the contents of a commit object and finds its subject line did not ignore leading blank lines, as is commonly done by other codepaths. Make it ignore leading blank lines to match.
Git does not know what the contents in the index should be for a path added with "git add -N" yet, so "git grep --cached" should not show hits (or show lack of hits, with -L) in such a path, but that logic does not apply to "git grep", i.e. searching in the working tree files. But we did so by mistake, which has been corrected.
"git rebase -i --autostash" did not restore the auto-stashed change when the operation was aborted.
"git commit --amend --allow-empty-message -S" for a commit without any message body could have misidentified where the header of the commit object ends.
More mark-up updates to typeset strings that are expected to literally typed by the end user in fixed-width font.
For a long time, we carried an in-code comment that said our colored output would work only when we use fprintf/fputs on Windows, which no longer is the case for the past few years.
"gc.autoPackLimit" when set to 1 should not trigger a repacking when there is only one pack, but the code counted poorly and did so.
One part of "git am" had an oddball helper function that called stuff from outside "his" as opposed to calling what we have "ours", which was not gender-neutral and also inconsistent with the rest of the system where outside stuff is usuall called "theirs" in contrast to "ours".
The test framework learned a new helper test_match_signal to check an exit code from getting killed by an expected signal.
"git blame -M" missed a single line that was moved within the file.
Fix recently introduced codepaths that are involved in parallel submodule operations, which gave up on reading too early, and could have wasted CPU while attempting to write under a corner case condition.
"git grep -i" has been taught to fold case in non-ascii locales correctly.
A test that unconditionally used "mktemp" learned that the command is not necessarily available everywhere.
"git blame file" allowed the lineage of lines in the uncommitted, unadded contents of "file" to be inspected, but it refused when "file" did not appear in the current commit. When "file" was created by renaming an existing file (but the change has not been committed), this restriction was unnecessarily tight.
"git add -N dir/file && git write-tree" produced an incorrect tree when there are other paths in the same directory that sorts after "file".
"git fetch http://user:pass@host/repo..." scrubbed the userinfo part, but "git push" didn't.
An age old bug that caused "git diff --ignore-space-at-eol" misbehave has been fixed.
"git notes merge" had a code to see if a path exists (and fails if it does) and then open the path for writing (when it doesn't). Replace it with open with O_EXCL.
"git pack-objects" and "git index-pack" mostly operate with off_t when talking about the offset of objects in a packfile, but there were a handful of places that used "unsigned long" to hold that value, leading to an unintended truncation.
Recent update to "git daemon" tries to enable the socket-level KEEPALIVE, but when it is spawned via inetd, the standard input file descriptor may not necessarily be connected to a socket. Suppress an ENOTSOCK error from setsockopt().
Recent FreeBSD stopped making perl available at /usr/bin/perl; switch the default the built-in path to /usr/local/bin/perl on not too ancient FreeBSD releases.
"git status" learned to suggest "merge --abort" during a conflicted merge, just like it already suggests "rebase --abort" during a conflicted rebase.
The .c/.h sources are marked as such in our .gitattributes file so that "git diff -W" and friends would work better.
Existing autoconf generated test for the need to link with pthread library did not check all the functions from pthread libraries; recent FreeBSD has some functions in libc but not others, and we mistakenly thought linking with libc is enough when it is not.
Allow http daemon tests in Travis CI tests.
Users of the parse_options_concat() API function need to allocate extra slots in advance and fill them with OPT_END() when they want to decide the set of supported options dynamically, which makes the code error-prone and hard to read. This has been corrected by tweaking the API to allocate and return a new copy of "struct option" array.
The use of strbuf in "git rm" to build filename to remove was a bit suboptimal, which has been fixed.
"git commit --help" said "--no-verify" is only about skipping the pre-commit hook, and failed to say that it also skipped the commit-msg hook.
"git merge" in Git v2.9 was taught to forbid merging an unrelated lines of history by default, but that is exactly the kind of thing the "--rejoin" mode of "git subtree" (in contrib/) wants to do. "git subtree" has been taught to use the "--allow-unrelated-histories" option to override the default.
The build procedure for "git persistent-https" helper (in contrib/) has been updated so that it can be built with more recent versions of Go.
There is an optimization used in "git diff $treeA $treeB" to borrow an already checked-out copy in the working tree when it is known to be the same as the blob being compared, expecting that open/mmap of such a file is faster than reading it from the object store, which involves inflating and applying delta. This however kicked in even when the checked-out copy needs to go through the convert-to-git conversion (including the clean filter), which defeats the whole point of the optimization. The optimization has been disabled when the conversion is necessary.
"git -c grep.patternType=extended log --basic-regexp" misbehaved because the internal API to access the grep machinery was not designed well.
Windows port was failing some tests in t4130, due to the lack of inum in the returned values by its lstat(2) emulation.
The characters in the label shown for tags/refs for commits in "gitweb" output are now properly escaped for proper HTML output.
FreeBSD can lie when asked mtime of a directory, which made the untracked cache code to fall back to a slow-path, which in turn caused tests in t7063 to fail because it wanted to verify the behaviour of the fast-path.
Squelch compiler warnings for netmalloc (in compat/) library.
The API documentation for hashmap was unclear if hashmap_entry can be safely discarded without any other consideration. State that it is safe to do so.
Not-so-recent rewrite of "git am" that started making internal calls into the commit machinery had an unintended regression, in that no matter how many seconds it took to apply many patches, the resulting committer timestamp for the resulting commits were all the same.
"git difftool ..." started in a subdirectory failed to interpret the paths relative to that directory, which has been fixed.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.9.2 (Jul 17, 2016)

New in Git 2.9.1 (Jul 12, 2016)

Fixes:
When "git daemon" is run without --[init-]timeout specified, a connection from a client that silently goes offline can hang around for a long time, wasting resources. The socket-level KEEPALIVE has been enabled to allow the OS to notice such failed connections.
The commands in `git log` family take %C(auto) in a custom format string. This unconditionally turned the color on, ignoring --no-color or with --color=auto when the output is not connected to a tty; this was corrected to make the format truly behave as "auto".
"git rev-list --count" whose walk-length is limited with "-n" option did not work well with the counting optimized to look at the bitmap index.
"git show -W" (extend hunks to cover the entire function, delimited by lines that match the "funcname" pattern) used to show the entire file when a change added an entire function at the end of the file, which has been fixed.
The documentation set has been updated so that literal commands, configuration variables and environment variables are consistently typeset in fixed-width font and bold in manpages.
"git svn propset" subcommand that was added in 2.3 days is documented now.
The documentation tries to consistently spell "GPG"; when referring to the specific program name, "gpg" is used.
"git reflog" stopped upon seeing an entry that denotes a branch creation event (aka "unborn"), which made it appear as if the reflog was truncated.
The git-prompt scriptlet (in contrib/) was not friendly with those who uses "set -u", which has been fixed.
A codepath that used alloca(3) to place an unbounded amount of data on the stack has been updated to avoid doing so.
"git update-index --add --chmod=+x file" may be usable as an escape hatch, but not a friendly thing to force for people who do need to use it regularly. "git add --chmod=+x file" can be used instead.
Build improvements for gnome-keyring (in contrib/)
"git status" used to say "working directory" when it meant "working tree".
Comments about misbehaving FreeBSD shells have been clarified with the version number (9.x and before are broken, newer ones are OK).
"git cherry-pick A" worked on an unborn branch, but "git cherry-pick A..B" didn't.
"git add -i/-p" learned to honor diff.compactionHeuristic experimental knob, so that the user can work on the same hunk split as "git diff" output.
"log --graph --format=" learned that "%>|(N)" specifies the width relative to the terminal's left edge, not relative to the area to draw text that is to the right of the ancestry-graph section. It also now accepts negative N that means the column limit is relative to the right border.
The ownership rule for the piece of memory that hold references to be fetched in "git fetch" was screwy, which has been cleaned up.
"git bisect" makes an internal call to "git diff-tree" when bisection finds the culprit, but this call did not initialize the data structure to pass to the diff-tree API correctly.
Formats of the various data (and how to validate them) where we use GPG signature have been documented.
Fix an unintended regression in v2.9 that breaks "clone --depth" that recurses down to submodules by forcing the submodules to also be cloned shallowly, which many server instances that host upstream of the submodules are not prepared for.
Fix unnecessarily waste in the idiomatic use of ': ${VAR=default}' to set the default value, without enclosing it in double quotes.
Some platform-specific code had non-ANSI strict declarations of C functions that do not take any parameters, which has been corrected.
The internal code used to show local timezone offset is not prepared to handle timestamps beyond year 2100, and gave a bogus offset value to the caller. Use a more benign looking +0000 instead and let "git log" going in such a case, instead of aborting.
One among four invocations of readlink(1) in our test suite has been rewritten so that the test can run on systems without the command (others are in valgrind test framework and t9802).
t/perf needs /usr/bin/time with GNU extension; the invocation of it is updated to "gtime" on Darwin.
A bug, which caused "git p4" while running under verbose mode to report paths that are omitted due to branch prefix incorrectly, has been fixed; the command said "Ignoring file outside of prefix" for paths that are _inside_.
The top level documentation "git help git" still pointed at the documentation set hosted at now-defunct google-code repository. Update it to point to https://git.github.io/htmldocs/git.html instead.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.9.0 (Jun 13, 2016)

UI, Workflows & Features:
Comes with git-multimail 1.3.1 (in contrib/).
The end-user facing commands like "git diff" and "git log" now enable the rename detection by default.
The credential.helper configuration variable is cumulative and there is no good way to override it from the command line. As a special case, giving an empty string as its value now serves as the signal to clear the values specified in various files.
A new "interactive.diffFilter" configuration can be used to customize the diff shown in "git add -i" sessions.
"git p4" now allows P4 author names to be mapped to Git author names.
"git rebase -x" can be used without passing "-i" option.
"git -c credential.= submodule" can now be used to propagate configuration variables related to credential helper down to the submodules.
"git tag" can create an annotated tag without explicitly given an "-a" (or "-s") option (i.e. when a tag message is given). A new configuration variable, tag.forceSignAnnotated, can be used to tell the command to create signed tag in such a situation.
"git merge" used to allow merging two branches that have no common base by default, which led to a brand new history of an existing project created and then get pulled by an unsuspecting maintainer, which allowed an unnecessary parallel history merged into the existing project. The command has been taught not to allow this by default, with an escape hatch "--allow-unrelated-histories" option to be used in a rare event that merges histories of two projects that started their lives independently.
"git pull" has been taught to pass the "--allow-unrelated-histories" option to underlying "git merge".
"git apply -v" learned to report paths in the patch that were skipped via --include/--exclude mechanism or being outside the current working directory.
Shell completion (in contrib/) updates.
The commit object name reported when "rebase -i" stops has been shortened.
"git worktree add" can be given "--no-checkout" option to only create an empty worktree without checking out the files.
"git mergetools" learned to drive ExamDiff.
"git pull --rebase" learned "--[no-]autostash" option, so that the rebase.autostash configuration variable set to true can be overridden from the command line.
When "git log" shows the log message indented by 4-spaces, the remainder of a line after a HT does not align in the way the author originally intended. The command now expands tabs by default to help such a case, and allows the users to override it with a new option, "--no-expand-tabs".
"git send-email" now uses a more readable timestamps when formulating a message ID.
"git rerere" can encounter two or more files with the same conflict signature that have to be resolved in different ways, but there was no way to record these separate resolutions.
"git p4" learned to record P4 jobs in Git commit that imports from the history in Perforce.
"git describe --contains" often made a hard-to-justify choice of tag to name a given commit, because it tried to come up with a name with smallest number of hops from a tag, causing an old commit whose close descendant that is recently tagged were not described with respect to an old tag but with a newer tag. It did not help that its computation of "hop" count was further tweaked to penalize being on a side branch of a merge. The logic has been updated to favor using the tag with the oldest tagger date, which is a lot easier to explain to the end users: "We describe a commit in terms of the (chronologically) oldest tag that contains the commit."
"git clone" learned the "--shallow-submodules" option.
HTTP transport clients learned to throw extra HTTP headers at the server, specified via http.extraHeader configuration variable.
The "--compaction-heuristic" option to "git diff" family of commands enables a heuristic to make the patch output more readable by using a blank line as a strong hint that the contents before and after it belong to logically separate units. It is still experimental.
A new configuration variable core.hooksPath allows customizing where the hook directory is.
An earlier addition of "sanitize_submodule_env" with 14111fc4 (git: submodule honor -c credential.* from command line, 2016-02-29) turned out to be a convoluted no-op; implement what it wanted to do correctly, and stop filtering settings given via "git -c var=val".
"git commit --dry-run" reported "No, no, you cannot commit." in one case where "git commit" would have allowed you to commit, and this improves it a little bit ("git commit --dry-run --short" still does not give you the correct answer, for example). This is a stop-gap measure in that "commit --short --dry-run" still gives an incorrect result.
The experimental "multiple worktree" feature gains more safety to forbid operations on a branch that is checked out or being actively worked on elsewhere, by noticing that e.g. it is being rebased.
"git format-patch" learned a new "--base" option to record what (public, well-known) commit the original series was built on in its output.
"git commit" learned to pay attention to the "commit.verbose" configuration variable and act as if the "--verbose" option was given from the command line.
Updated documentation gives hints to GMail users with two-factor auth enabled that they need app-specific-password when using "git send-email".
The manpage output of our documentation did not render well in terminal; typeset literals in bold by default to make them stand out more.
The mark-up in the top-level README.md file has been updated to typeset CLI command names differently from the body text.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
The embedded args argv-array in the child process is used to build the command line to run pack-objects instead of using a separate array of strings.
A test for tags has been restructured so that more parts of it can easily be run on a platform without a working GnuPG.
The startup_info data, which records if we are working inside a repository (among other things), are now uniformly available to Git subcommand implementations, and Git avoids attempting to touch references when we are not in a repository.
The command line argument parser for "receive-pack" has been rewritten to use parse-options.
A major part of "git submodule update" has been ported to C to take advantage of the recently added framework to run download tasks in parallel. Other updates to "git submodule" that move pieces of logic to C continues.
Rename bunch of tests on "git clone" for better organization.
The tests that involve running httpd leaked the system-wide configuration in /etc/gitconfig to the tested environment.
Build updates for MSVC.
The repository set-up sequence has been streamlined (the biggest change is that there is no longer git_config_early()), so that we do not attempt to look into refs/* when we know we do not have a Git repository.
Code restructuring around the "refs" API to prepare for pluggable refs backends.
Sources to many test helper binaries and the generated helpers have been moved to t/helper/ subdirectory to reduce clutter at the top level of the tree.
Unify internal logic between "git tag -v" and "git verify-tag" commands by making one directly call into the other.
"merge-recursive" strategy incorrectly checked if a path that is involved in its internal merge exists in the working tree.
The test scripts for "git p4" (but not "git p4" implementation itself) has been updated so that they would work even on a system where the installed version of Python is python 3.
As nobody maintains our in-tree git.spec.in and distros use their own spec file, we stopped pretending that we support "make rpm".
Move from "unsigned char[20]" to "struct object_id" continues.
The code for warning_errno/die_errno has been refactored and a new error_errno() reporting helper is introduced. (merge 1da045f nd/error-errno later to maint).
Running tests with '-x' option to trace the individual command executions is a useful way to debug test scripts, but some tests that capture the standard error stream and check what the command said can be broken with the trace output mixed in. When running our tests under "bash", however, we can redirect the trace output to another file descriptor to keep the standard error of programs being tested intact.
t0040 had too many unnecessary repetitions in its test data. Teach test-parse-options program so that a caller can tell what it expects in its output, so that these repetitions can be cleaned up.
Add perf test for "rebase -i".
Common mistakes when writing gitlink: in our documentation are found by "make check-docs".
t9xxx series has been updated primarily for readability, while fixing small bugs in it. A few scripted Porcelain commands have also been updated to fix possible bugs around their use of "test -z" and "test -n".
CI test was taught to run git-svn tests.
"git cat-file --batch-all" has been sped up, by taking advantage of the fact that it does not have to read a list of objects, in two ways.
test updates to make it more readable and maintainable. (merge e6273f4 es/t1500-modernize later to maint).
"make DEVELOPER=1" worked as expected; setting DEVELOPER=1 in config.mak didn't. (merge 51dd3e8 mm/makefile-developer-can-be-in-config-mak later to maint).
The way how "submodule--helper list" signals unmatch error to its callers has been updated.
A bash-ism "local" has been removed from "git submodule" scripted Porcelain.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.8 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).
"git config --get-urlmatch", unlike other variants of the "git config --get" family, did not signal error with its exit status when there was no matching configuration.
The "--local-env-vars" and "--resolve-git-dir" options of "git rev-parse" failed to work outside a repository when the command's option parsing was rewritten in 1.8.5 era.
"git index-pack --keep[=] pack-$name.pack" simply did not work.
Fetching of history by naming a commit object name directly didn't work across remote-curl transport.
A small memory leak in an error codepath has been plugged in xdiff code.
strbuf_getwholeline() did not NUL-terminate the buffer on certain corner cases in its error codepath.
"git mergetool" did not work well with conflicts that both sides deleted.
"git send-email" had trouble parsing alias file in mailrc format when lines in it had trailing whitespaces on them.
When "git merge --squash" stopped due to conflict, the concluding "git commit" failed to read in the SQUASH_MSG that shows the log messages from all the squashed commits.
"git merge FETCH_HEAD" dereferenced NULL pointer when merging nothing into an unborn history (which is arguably unusual usage, which perhaps was the reason why nobody noticed it).
When "git worktree" feature is in use, "git branch -d" allowed deletion of a branch that is checked out in another worktree, which was wrong.
When "git worktree" feature is in use, "git branch -m" renamed a branch that is checked out in another worktree without adjusting the HEAD symbolic ref for the worktree.
"git diff -M" used to work better when two originally identical files A and B got renamed to X/A and X/B by pairing A to X/A and B to X/B, but this was broken in the 2.0 timeframe.
"git send-pack --all " was broken when its command line option parsing was written in the 2.6 timeframe.
"git format-patch --help" showed `-s` and `--no-patch` as if these are valid options to the command. We already hide `--patch` option from the documentation, because format-patch is about showing the diff, and the documentation now hides these options as well.
When running "git blame $path" with unnormalized data in the index for the path, the data in the working tree was blamed, even though "git add" would not have changed what is already in the index, due to "safe crlf" that disables the line-end conversion. It has been corrected.
A change back in version 2.7 to "git branch" broke display of a symbolic ref in a non-standard place in the refs/ hierarchy (we expect symbolic refs to appear in refs/remotes/*/HEAD to point at the primary branch the remote has, and as .git/HEAD to point at the branch we locally checked out).
A partial rewrite of "git submodule" in the 2.7 timeframe changed the way the gitdir: pointer in the submodules point at the real repository location to use absolute paths by accident. This has been corrected.
"git commit" misbehaved in a few minor ways when an empty message is given via -m '', all of which has been corrected.
Support for CRAM-MD5 authentication method in "git imap-send" did not work well.
Upcoming OpenSSL 1.1.0 will break compilation by updating a few API elements we use in imap-send, which has been adjusted for the change.
The socks5:// proxy support added back in 2.6.4 days was not aware that socks5h:// proxies behave differently from socks5:// proxies.
"git config" had a codepath that tried to pass a NULL to printf("%s"), which nobody seems to have noticed.
On Cygwin, object creation uses the "create a temporary and then rename it to the final name" pattern, not "create a temporary, hardlink it to the final name and then unlink the temporary" pattern.
This is necessary to use Git on Windows shared directories, and is already enabled for the MinGW and plain Windows builds. It also has been used in Cygwin packaged versions of Git for quite a while. See http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/291853
"merge-octopus" strategy did not ensure that the index is clean when merge begins.
When "git merge" notices that the merge can be resolved purely at the tree level (without having to merge blobs) and the resulting tree happens to already exist in the object store, it forgot to update the index, which left an inconsistent state that would break later operations.
"git submodule" reports the paths of submodules the command recurses into, but these paths were incorrectly reported when the command was not run from the root level of the superproject.
The "user.useConfigOnly" configuration variable makes it an error if users do not explicitly set user.name and user.email. However, its check was not done early enough and allowed another error to trigger, reporting that the default value we guessed from the system setting was unusable. This was a suboptimal end-user experience as we want the users to set user.name/user.email without relying on the auto-detection at all.
"git mv old new" did not adjust the path for a submodule that lives as a subdirectory inside old/ directory correctly.
"git replace -e" did not honour "core.editor" configuration.
"git push" from a corrupt repository that attempts to push a large number of refs deadlocked; the thread to relay rejection notices for these ref updates blocked on writing them to the main thread, after the main thread at the receiving end notices that the push failed and decides not to read these notices and return a failure.
mmap emulation on Windows has been optimized and work better without consuming paging store when not needed.
A question by "git send-email" to ask the identity of the sender has been updated.
UI consistency improvements for "git mergetool".
"git rebase -m" could be asked to rebase an entire branch starting from the root, but failed by assuming that there always is a parent commit to the first commit on the branch.
Fix a broken "p4 lfs" test.
Recent update to Git LFS broke "git p4" by changing the output from its "lfs pointer" subcommand.
"git fetch" test t5510 was flaky while running a (forced) automagic garbage collection.
Documentation updates to help contributors setting up Travis CI test for their patches.
Some multi-byte encoding can have a backslash byte as a later part of one letter, which would confuse "highlight" filter used in gitweb.
"git commit-tree" plumbing command required the user to always sign its result when the user sets the commit.gpgsign configuration variable, which was an ancient mistake. Rework "git rebase" that relied on this mistake so that it reads commit.gpgsign and pass (or not pass) the -S option to "git commit-tree" to keep the end-user expectation the same, while teaching "git commit-tree" to ignore the configuration variable. This will stop requiring the users to sign commit objects used internally as an implementation detail of "git stash".
"http.cookieFile" configuration variable clearly wants a pathname, but we forgot to treat it as such by e.g. applying tilde expansion.
Consolidate description of tilde-expansion that is done to configuration variables that take pathname to a single place.
Correct faulty recommendation to use "git submodule deinit ." when de-initialising all submodules, which would result in a strange error message in a pathological corner case.
Many 'linkgit:' references were broken, which are all fixed with this.
"git rerere" can get confused by conflict markers deliberately left by the inner merge step, because they are indistinguishable from the real conflict markers left by the outermost merge which are what the end user and "rerere" need to look at. This was fixed by making the conflict markers left by the inner merges a bit longer. (merge 0f9fd5c jc/ll-merge-internal later to maint).
CI test was taught to build documentation pages.
"git fsck" learned to catch NUL byte in a commit object as potential error and warn.
Portability enhancement for "rebase -i" to help platforms whose shell does not like "for i in " (which is not POSIX-kosher).
On Windows, .git and optionally any files whose name starts with a dot are now marked as hidden, with a core.hideDotFiles knob to customize this behaviour.
Documentation for "git merge --verify-signatures" has been updated to clarify that the signature of only the commit at the tip is verified. Also the phrasing used for signature and key validity is adjusted to align with that used by OpenPGP.
A couple of bugs around core.autocrlf have been fixed.
Many commands normalize command line arguments from NFD to NFC variant of UTF-8 on OSX, but commands in the "diff" family did not, causing "git diff $path" to complain that no such path is known to Git. They have been taught to do the normalization.
"git difftool" learned to handle unmerged paths correctly in dir-diff mode.
The "are we talking with TTY, doing an interactive session?" detection has been updated to work better for "Git for Windows".
We forgot to add "git log --decorate=auto" to documentation when we added the feature back in v2.1.0 timeframe. (merge 462cbb4 rj/log-decorate-auto later to maint).
"git fast-import --export-marks" would overwrite the existing marks file even when it makes a dump from its custom die routine. Prevent it from doing so when we have an import-marks file but haven't finished reading it. (merge f4beed6 fc/fast-import-broken-marks-file later to maint).
"git rebase -i", after it fails to auto-resolve the conflict, had an unnecessary call to "git rerere" from its very early days, which was spotted recently; the call has been removed. (merge 7063693 js/rebase-i-dedup-call-to-rerere later to maint).
Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates (merge cd82b7a pa/cherry-pick-doc-typo later to maint). (merge 2bb73ae rs/patch-id-use-skip-prefix later to maint). (merge aa20cbc rs/apply-name-terminate later to maint). (merge fe17fc0 jc/t2300-setup later to maint).
(merge e256eec jk/shell-portability later to maint).

New in Git 2.8.4 (Jun 7, 2016)

Fixes since v2.8.3:
Documentation for "git merge --verify-signatures" has been updated to clarify that the signature of only the commit at the tip is verified. Also the phrasing used for signature and key validity is adjusted to align with that used by OpenPGP.
On Windows, .git and optionally any files whose name starts with a dot are now marked as hidden, with a core.hideDotFiles knob to customize this behaviour.
Portability enhancement for "rebase -i" to help platforms whose shell does not like "for i in " (which is not POSIX-kosher).
"git fsck" learned to catch NUL byte in a commit object as potential error and warn.
CI test was taught to build documentation pages.
Many 'linkgit:' references were broken, which are all fixed with this.
"git describe --contains" often made a hard-to-justify choice of tag to give name to a given commit, because it tried to come up with a name with smallest number of hops from a tag, causing an old commit whose close descendant that is recently tagged were not described with respect to an old tag but with a newer tag. It did not help that its computation of "hop" count was further tweaked to penalize being on a side branch of a merge. The logic has been updated to favor using the tag with the oldest tagger date, which is a lot easier to explain to the end users: "We describe a commit in terms of the (chronologically) oldest tag that contains the commit."
Running tests with '-x' option to trace the individual command executions is a useful way to debug test scripts, but some tests that capture the standard error stream and check what the command said can be broken with the trace output mixed in. When running our tests under "bash", however, we can redirect the trace output to another file descriptor to keep the standard error of programs being tested intact.
"http.cookieFile" configuration variable clearly wants a pathname, but we forgot to treat it as such by e.g. applying tilde expansion.
When de-initialising all submodules, "git submodule deinit" gave a faulty recommendation to use "git submodule deinit .", which would result in a strange error message in a pathological corner case. This has been corrected to suggest "submodule deinit --all" instead.
Many commands normalize command line arguments from NFD to NFC variant of UTF-8 on OSX, but commands in the "diff" family did not, causing "git diff $path" to complain that no such path is known to Git. They have been taught to do the normalization.
A couple of bugs around core.autocrlf have been fixed.
"git difftool" learned to handle unmerged paths correctly in dir-diff mode.
The "are we talking with TTY, doing an interactive session?" detection has been updated to work better for "Git for Windows".
Also contains other minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.9.0 RC 1 (May 31, 2016)

UPDATES SINCE V2.8:
UI, Workflows & Features:
Comes with git-multimail 1.3.1 (in contrib/).
The end-user facing commands like "git diff" and "git log" now enable the rename detection by default.
The credential.helper configuration variable is cumulative and there is no good way to override it from the command line. As a special case, giving an empty string as its value now serves as the signal to clear the values specified in various files.
A new "interactive.diffFilter" configuration can be used to customize the diff shown in "git add -i" sessions.
"git p4" now allows P4 author names to be mapped to Git author names.
"git rebase -x" can be used without passing "-i" option.
"git -c credential.= submodule" can now be used to propagate configuration variables related to credential helper down to the submodules.
"git tag" can create an annotated tag without explicitly given an "-a" (or "-s") option (i.e. when a tag message is given). A new configuration variable, tag.forceSignAnnotated, can be used to tell the command to create signed tag in such a situation.
"git merge" used to allow merging two branches that have no common base by default, which led to a brand new history of an existing project created and then get pulled by an unsuspecting maintainer, which allowed an unnecessary parallel history merged into the existing project. The command has been taught not to allow this by default, with an escape hatch "--allow-unrelated-histories" option to be used in a rare event that merges histories of two projects that started their lives independently.
"git pull" has been taught to pass the "--allow-unrelated-histories" option to underlying "git merge".
"git apply -v" learned to report paths in the patch that were skipped via --include/--exclude mechanism or being outside the current working directory.
Shell completion (in contrib/) updates.
The commit object name reported when "rebase -i" stops has been shortened.
"git worktree add" can be given "--no-checkout" option to only create an empty worktree without checking out the files.
"git mergetools" learned to drive ExamDiff.
"git pull --rebase" learned "--[no-]autostash" option, so that the rebase.autostash configuration variable set to true can be overridden from the command line.
When "git log" shows the log message indented by 4-spaces, the remainder of a line after a HT does not align in the way the author originally intended. The command now expands tabs by default to help such a case, and allows the users to override it with a new option, "--no-expand-tabs".
"git send-email" now uses a more readable timestamps when formulating a message ID.
"git rerere" can encounter two or more files with the same conflict signature that have to be resolved in different ways, but there was no way to record these separate resolutions.
"git p4" learned to record P4 jobs in Git commit that imports from the history in Perforce.
"git describe --contains" often made a hard-to-justify choice of tag to name a given commit, because it tried to come up with a name with smallest number of hops from a tag, causing an old commit whose close descendant that is recently tagged were not described with respect to an old tag but with a newer tag. It did not help that its computation of "hop" count was further tweaked to penalize being on a side branch of a merge. The logic has been updated to favor using the tag with the oldest tagger date, which is a lot easier to explain to the end users: "We describe a commit in terms of the (chronologically) oldest tag that contains the commit." (merge 7550424 js/name-rev-use-oldest-ref later to maint).
"git clone" learned the "--shallow-submodules" option.
HTTP transport clients learned to throw extra HTTP headers at the server, specified via http.extraHeader configuration variable.
Patch output from "git diff" and friends has been tweaked to be more readable by using a blank line as a strong hint that the contents before and after it belong to logically separate units.
A new configuration variable core.hooksPath allows customizing where the hook directory is.
An earlier addition of "sanitize_submodule_env" with 14111fc4 (git: submodule honor -c credential.* from command line, 2016-02-29) turned out to be a convoluted no-op; implement what it wanted to do correctly, and stop filtering settings given via "git -c var=val".
"git commit --dry-run" reported "No, no, you cannot commit." in one case where "git commit" would have allowed you to commit, and this improves it a little bit ("git commit --dry-run --short" still does not give you the correct answer, for example). This is a stop-gap measure in that "commit --short --dry-run" still gives an incorrect result.
The experimental "multiple worktree" feature gains more safety to forbid operations on a branch that is checked out or being actively worked on elsewhere, by noticing that e.g. it is being rebased.
"git format-patch" learned a new "--base" option to record what (public, well-known) commit the original series was built on in its output.
"git commit" learned to pay attention to the "commit.verbose" configuration variable and act as if the "--verbose" option was given from the command line.
Updated documentation gives hints to GMail users with two-factor auth enabled that they need app-specific-password when using "git send-email".
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
The embedded args argv-array in the child process is used to build the command line to run pack-objects instead of using a separate array of strings.
A test for tags has been restructured so that more parts of it can easily be run on a platform without a working GnuPG.
The startup_info data, which records if we are working inside a repository (among other things), are now uniformly available to Git subcommand implementations, and Git avoids attempting to touch references when we are not in a repository.
The command line argument parser for "receive-pack" has been rewritten to use parse-options.
A major part of "git submodule update" has been ported to C to take advantage of the recently added framework to run download tasks in parallel. Other updates to "git submodule" that move pieces of logic to C continues.
Rename bunch of tests on "git clone" for better organization.
The tests that involve running httpd leaked the system-wide configuration in /etc/gitconfig to the tested environment.
Build updates for MSVC.
The repository set-up sequence has been streamlined (the biggest change is that there is no longer git_config_early()), so that we do not attempt to look into refs/* when we know we do not have a Git repository.
Code restructuring around the "refs" API to prepare for pluggable refs backends.
Sources to many test helper binaries and the generated helpers have been moved to t/helper/ subdirectory to reduce clutter at the top level of the tree.
Unify internal logic between "git tag -v" and "git verify-tag" commands by making one directly call into the other.
"merge-recursive" strategy incorrectly checked if a path that is involved in its internal merge exists in the working tree.
The test scripts for "git p4" (but not "git p4" implementation itself) has been updated so that they would work even on a system where the installed version of Python is python 3.
As nobody maintains our in-tree git.spec.in and distros use their own spec file, we stopped pretending that we support "make rpm".
Move from "unsigned char[20]" to "struct object_id" continues.
The code for warning_errno/die_errno has been refactored and a new error_errno() reporting helper is introduced. (merge 1da045f nd/error-errno later to maint).
Running tests with '-x' option to trace the individual command executions is a useful way to debug test scripts, but some tests that capture the standard error stream and check what the command said can be broken with the trace output mixed in. When running our tests under "bash", however, we can redirect the trace output to another file descriptor to keep the standard error of programs being tested intact. (merge d88785e jk/test-send-sh-x-trace-elsewhere later to maint).
t0040 had too many unnecessary repetitions in its test data. Teach test-parse-options program so that a caller can tell what it expects in its output, so that these repetitions can be cleaned up.
Add perf test for "rebase -i".
Common mistakes when writing gitlink: in our documentation are found by "make check-docs".
t9xxx series has been updated primarily for readability, while fixing small bugs in it. A few scripted Porcelain commands have also been updated to fix possible bugs around their use of "test -z" and "test -n".
CI test was taught to run git-svn tests.
"git cat-file --batch-all" has been sped up, by taking advantage of the fact that it does not have to read a list of objects, in two ways.
test updates to make it more readable and maintainable. (merge e6273f4 es/t1500-modernize later to maint).
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.8:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.8 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).
"git config --get-urlmatch", unlike other variants of the "git config --get" family, did not signal error with its exit status when there was no matching configuration.
The "--local-env-vars" and "--resolve-git-dir" options of "git rev-parse" failed to work outside a repository when the command's option parsing was rewritten in 1.8.5 era.
"git index-pack --keep[=] pack-$name.pack" simply did not work.
Fetching of history by naming a commit object name directly didn't work across remote-curl transport.
A small memory leak in an error codepath has been plugged in xdiff code.
strbuf_getwholeline() did not NUL-terminate the buffer on certain corner cases in its error codepath.
"git mergetool" did not work well with conflicts that both sides deleted.
"git send-email" had trouble parsing alias file in mailrc format when lines in it had trailing whitespaces on them.
When "git merge --squash" stopped due to conflict, the concluding "git commit" failed to read in the SQUASH_MSG that shows the log messages from all the squashed commits.
"git merge FETCH_HEAD" dereferenced NULL pointer when merging nothing into an unborn history (which is arguably unusual usage, which perhaps was the reason why nobody noticed it).
When "git worktree" feature is in use, "git branch -d" allowed deletion of a branch that is checked out in another worktree, which was wrong.
When "git worktree" feature is in use, "git branch -m" renamed a branch that is checked out in another worktree without adjusting the HEAD symbolic ref for the worktree.
"git diff -M" used to work better when two originally identical files A and B got renamed to X/A and X/B by pairing A to X/A and B to X/B, but this was broken in the 2.0 timeframe.
"git send-pack --all " was broken when its command line option parsing was written in the 2.6 timeframe.
"git format-patch --help" showed `-s` and `--no-patch` as if these are valid options to the command. We already hide `--patch` option from the documentation, because format-patch is about showing the diff, and the documentation now hides these options as well.
When running "git blame $path" with unnormalized data in the index for the path, the data in the working tree was blamed, even though "git add" would not have changed what is already in the index, due to "safe crlf" that disables the line-end conversion. It has been corrected.
A change back in version 2.7 to "git branch" broke display of a symbolic ref in a non-standard place in the refs/ hierarchy (we expect symbolic refs to appear in refs/remotes/*/HEAD to point at the primary branch the remote has, and as .git/HEAD to point at the branch we locally checked out).
A partial rewrite of "git submodule" in the 2.7 timeframe changed the way the gitdir: pointer in the submodules point at the real repository location to use absolute paths by accident. This has been corrected.
"git commit" misbehaved in a few minor ways when an empty message is given via -m '', all of which has been corrected.
Support for CRAM-MD5 authentication method in "git imap-send" did not work well.
Upcoming OpenSSL 1.1.0 will break compilation by updating a few API elements we use in imap-send, which has been adjusted for the change.
The socks5:// proxy support added back in 2.6.4 days was not aware that socks5h:// proxies behave differently from socks5:// proxies.
"git config" had a codepath that tried to pass a NULL to printf("%s"), which nobody seems to have noticed.
On Cygwin, object creation uses the "create a temporary and then rename it to the final name" pattern, not "create a temporary, hardlink it to the final name and then unlink the temporary" pattern.
This is necessary to use Git on Windows shared directories, and is already enabled for the MinGW and plain Windows builds. It also has been used in Cygwin packaged versions of Git for quite a while. See http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/291853
"merge-octopus" strategy did not ensure that the index is clean when merge begins.
When "git merge" notices that the merge can be resolved purely at the tree level (without having to merge blobs) and the resulting tree happens to already exist in the object store, it forgot to update the index, which left an inconsistent state that would break later operations.
"git submodule" reports the paths of submodules the command recurses into, but these paths were incorrectly reported when the command was not run from the root level of the superproject.
The "user.useConfigOnly" configuration variable makes it an error if users do not explicitly set user.name and user.email. However, its check was not done early enough and allowed another error to trigger, reporting that the default value we guessed from the system setting was unusable. This was a suboptimal end-user experience as we want the users to set user.name/user.email without relying on the auto-detection at all.
"git mv old new" did not adjust the path for a submodule that lives as a subdirectory inside old/ directory correctly.
"git replace -e" did not honour "core.editor" configuration.
"git push" from a corrupt repository that attempts to push a large number of refs deadlocked; the thread to relay rejection notices for these ref updates blocked on writing them to the main thread, after the main thread at the receiving end notices that the push failed and decides not to read these notices and return a failure.
mmap emulation on Windows has been optimized and work better without consuming paging store when not needed.
A question by "git send-email" to ask the identity of the sender has been updated.
UI consistency improvements for "git mergetool".
"git rebase -m" could be asked to rebase an entire branch starting from the root, but failed by assuming that there always is a parent commit to the first commit on the branch.
Fix a broken "p4 lfs" test.
Recent update to Git LFS broke "git p4" by changing the output from its "lfs pointer" subcommand.
"git fetch" test t5510 was flaky while running a (forced) automagic garbage collection.
Documentation updates to help contributors setting up Travis CI test for their patches.
Some multi-byte encoding can have a backslash byte as a later part of one letter, which would confuse "highlight" filter used in gitweb.
"git commit-tree" plumbing command required the user to always sign its result when the user sets the commit.gpgsign configuration variable, which was an ancient mistake. Rework "git rebase" that relied on this mistake so that it reads commit.gpgsign and pass (or not pass) the -S option to "git commit-tree" to keep the end-user expectation the same, while teaching "git commit-tree" to ignore the configuration variable. This will stop requiring the users to sign commit objects used internally as an implementation detail of "git stash".
"http.cookieFile" configuration variable clearly wants a pathname, but we forgot to treat it as such by e.g. applying tilde expansion. (merge e5a39ad bn/http-cookiefile-config later to maint).
Consolidate description of tilde-expansion that is done to configuration variables that take pathname to a single place. (merge dca83ab jc/config-pathname-type later to maint).
Correct faulty recommendation to use "git submodule deinit ." when de-initialising all submodules, which would result in a strange error message in a pathological corner case. (merge f6a5279 sb/submodule-deinit-all later to maint).
Many 'linkgit:' references were broken, which are all fixed with this. (merge 1cca17d jc/linkgit-fix later to maint).
"git rerere" can get confused by conflict markers deliberately left by the inner merge step, because they are indistinguishable from the real conflict markers left by the outermost merge which are what the end user and "rerere" need to look at. This was fixed by making the conflict markers left by the inner merges a bit longer. (merge 0f9fd5c jc/ll-merge-internal later to maint).
CI test was taught to build documentation pages. (merge b98712b ls/travis-build-doc later to maint).
"git fsck" learned to catch NUL byte in a commit object as potential error and warn. (merge 6d2d780 jc/fsck-nul-in-commit later to maint).
Portability enhancement for "rebase -i" to help platforms whose shell does not like "for i in " (which is not POSIX-kosher). (merge 8e98b35 jk/rebase-interactive-eval-fix later to maint).
On Windows, .git and optionally any files whose name starts with a dot are now marked as hidden, with a core.hideDotFiles knob to customize this behaviour. (merge ebf31e7 js/windows-dotgit later to maint).
Documentation for "git merge --verify-signatures" has been updated to clarify that the signature of only the commit at the tip is verified. Also the phrasing used for signature and key validity is adjusted to align with that used by OpenPGP. (merge 05a5869 kf/gpg-sig-verification-doc later to maint).
A couple of bugs around core.autocrlf have been fixed. (merge caa47ad tb/core-eol-fix later to maint).
Many commands normalize command line arguments from NFD to NFC variant of UTF-8 on OSX, but commands in the "diff" family did not, causing "git diff $path" to complain that no such path is known to Git. They have been taught to do the normalization. (merge 90a78b8 ar/diff-args-osx-precompose later to maint).
"git difftool" learned to handle unmerged paths correctly in dir-diff mode. (merge 366f9ce da/difftool later to maint).
The "are we talking with TTY, doing an interactive session?" detection has been updated to work better for "Git for Windows". (merge f7f90e0 kb/msys2-tty later to maint).
We forgot to add "git log --decorate=auto" to documentation when we added the feature back in v2.1.0 timeframe. (merge 462cbb4 rj/log-decorate-auto later to maint).
"git fast-import --export-marks" would overwrite the existing marks file even when it makes a dump from its custom die routine. Prevent it from doing so when we have an import-marks file but haven't finished reading it. (merge f4beed6 fc/fast-import-broken-marks-file later to maint).

New in Git 2.8.3 (May 19, 2016)

Fixes:
"git send-email" now uses a more readable timestamps when formulating a message ID.
The repository set-up sequence has been streamlined (the biggest change is that there is no longer git_config_early()), so that we do not attempt to look into refs/* when we know we do not have a Git repository.
When "git worktree" feature is in use, "git branch -d" allowed deletion of a branch that is checked out in another worktree
When "git worktree" feature is in use, "git branch -m" renamed a branch that is checked out in another worktree without adjusting the HEAD symbolic ref for the worktree.
"git format-patch --help" showed `-s` and `--no-patch` as if these are valid options to the command. We already hide `--patch` option from the documentation, because format-patch is about showing the diff, and the documentation now hides these options as well.
A change back in version 2.7 to "git branch" broke display of a symbolic ref in a non-standard place in the refs/ hierarchy (we expect symbolic refs to appear in refs/remotes/*/HEAD to point at the primary branch the remote has, and as .git/HEAD to point at the branch we locally checked out).
A partial rewrite of "git submodule" in the 2.7 timeframe changed the way the gitdir: pointer in the submodules point at the real repository location to use absolute paths by accident. This has been corrected.
"git commit" misbehaved in a few minor ways when an empty message is given via -m '', all of which has been corrected.
Support for CRAM-MD5 authentication method in "git imap-send" did not work well.
The socks5:// proxy support added back in 2.6.4 days was not aware that socks5h:// proxies behave differently.
"git config" had a codepath that tried to pass a NULL to printf("%s"), which nobody seems to have noticed.
On Cygwin, object creation uses the "create a temporary and then rename it to the final name" pattern, not "create a temporary, hardlink it to the final name and then unlink the temporary" pattern.
This is necessary to use Git on Windows shared directories, and is already enabled for the MinGW and plain Windows builds. It also has been used in Cygwin packaged versions of Git for quite a while. See http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/291853 and http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/275680.
"git replace -e" did not honour "core.editor" configuration.
Upcoming OpenSSL 1.1.0 will break compilation b updating a few APIs we use in imap-send, which has been adjusted for the change.
"git submodule" reports the paths of submodules the command recurses into, but this was incorrect when the command was not run from the root level of the superproject.
The test scripts for "git p4" (but not "git p4" implementation itself) has been updated so that they would work even on a system where the installed version of Python is python 3.
The "user.useConfigOnly" configuration variable makes it an error if users do not explicitly set user.name and user.email. However, its check was not done early enough and allowed another error to trigger, reporting that the default value we guessed from the system setting was unusable. This was a suboptimal end-user experience as we want the users to set user.name/user.email without relying on the auto-detection at all.
"git mv old new" did not adjust the path for a submodule that lives as a subdirectory inside old/ directory correctly.
"git push" from a corrupt repository that attempts to push a large number of refs deadlocked; the thread to relay rejection notices for these ref updates blocked on writing them to the main thread, after the main thread at the receiving end notices that the push failed and decides not to read these notices and return a failure.
A question by "git send-email" to ask the identity of the sender has been updated.
Recent update to Git LFS broke "git p4" by changing the output from its "lfs pointer" subcommand.
Some multi-byte encoding can have a backslash byte as a later part of one letter, which would confuse "highlight" filter used in gitweb.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.8.2 (Apr 29, 2016)

Fixes since v2.8.1:
The embedded args argv-array in the child process is used to build the command line to run pack-objects instead of using a separate array of strings.
Bunch of tests on "git clone" has been renumbered for better organization.
The tests that involve running httpd leaked the system-wide configuration in /etc/gitconfig to the tested environment.
"index-pack --keep=" was broken since v2.1.0 timeframe.
"git config --get-urlmatch", unlike other variants of the "git config --get" family, did not signal error with its exit status when there was no matching configuration.
The "--local-env-vars" and "--resolve-git-dir" options of "git rev-parse" failed to work outside a repository when the command's option parsing was rewritten in 1.8.5 era.
Fetching of history by naming a commit object name directly didn't work across remote-curl transport.
A small memory leak in an error codepath has been plugged in xdiff code.
strbuf_getwholeline() did not NUL-terminate the buffer on certain corner cases in its error codepath.
The startup_info data, which records if we are working inside a repository (among other things), are now uniformly available to Git subcommand implementations, and Git avoids attempting to touch references when we are not in a repository.
"git mergetool" did not work well with conflicts that both sides deleted.
"git send-email" had trouble parsing alias file in mailrc format when lines in it had trailing whitespaces on them.
When "git merge --squash" stopped due to conflict, the concluding "git commit" failed to read in the SQUASH_MSG that shows the log messages from all the squashed commits.
"git merge FETCH_HEAD" dereferenced NULL pointer when merging nothing into an unborn history (which is arguably unusual usage, which perhaps was the reason why nobody noticed it).
Build updates for MSVC.
"git diff -M" used to work better when two originally identical files A and B got renamed to X/A and X/B by pairing A to X/A and B to X/B, but this was broken in the 2.0 timeframe.
"git send-pack --all " was broken when its command line option parsing was written in the 2.6 timeframe.
When running "git blame $path" with unnormalized data in the index for the path, the data in the working tree was blamed, even though "git add" would not have changed what is already in the index, due to "safe crlf" that disables the line-end conversion. It has been corrected.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.8.1 (Apr 4, 2016)

New in Git 2.8.0 (Mar 28, 2016)

Backward compatibility note:
The rsync:// transport has been removed.
Updates since v2.7:
UI, Workflows & Features
It turns out "git clone" over rsync transport has been broken when the source repository has packed references for a long time, and nobody noticed nor complained about it.
"push" learned that its "--delete" option can be shortened to "-d", just like "branch --delete" and "branch -d" are the same thing.
"git blame" learned to produce the progress eye-candy when it takes too much time before emitting the first line of the result.
"git grep" can now be configured (or told from the command line) how many threads to use when searching in the working tree files.
Some "git notes" operations, e.g. "git log --notes=", should be able to read notes from any tree-ish that is shaped like a notes tree, but the notes infrastructure required that the argument must be a ref under refs/notes/. Loosen it to require a valid ref only when the operation would update the notes (in which case we must have a place to store the updated notes tree, iow, a ref).
"git grep" by default does not fall back to its "--no-index" behavior outside a directory under Git's control (otherwise the user may by mistake end up running a huge recursive search); with a new configuration (set in $HOME/.gitconfig--by definition this cannot be set in the config file per project), this safety can be disabled.
"git pull --rebase" has been extended to allow invoking "rebase -i".
"git p4" learned to cope with the type of a file getting changed.
"git format-patch" learned to notice format.outputDirectory configuration variable. This allows "-o " option to be omitted on the command line if you always use the same directory in your workflow.
"interpret-trailers" has been taught to optionally update a file in place, instead of always writing the result to the standard output.
Many commands that read files that are expected to contain text that is generated (or can be edited) by the end user to control their behavior (e.g. "git grep -f ") have been updated to be more tolerant to lines that are terminated with CRLF (they used to treat such a line to contain payload that ends with CR, which is usually not what the users expect).
"git notes merge" used to limit the source of the merged notes tree to somewhere under refs/notes/ hierarchy, which was too limiting when inventing a workflow to exchange notes with remote repositories using remote-tracking notes trees (located in e.g. refs/remote-notes/ or somesuch).
"git ls-files" learned a new "--eol" option to help diagnose end-of-line problems.
"ls-remote" learned an option to show which branch the remote repository advertises as its primary by pointing its HEAD at.
New http.proxyAuthMethod configuration variable can be used to specify what authentication method to use, as a way to work around proxies that do not give error response expected by libcurl when CURLAUTH_ANY is used. Also, the codepath for proxy authentication has been taught to use credential API to store the authentication material in user's keyrings.
Update the untracked cache subsystem and change its primary UI from "git update-index" to "git config".
There were a few "now I am doing this thing" progress messages in the TCP connection code that can be triggered by setting a verbose option internally in the code, but "git fetch -v" and friends never passed the verbose option down to that codepath.
Clean/smudge filters defined in a configuration file of lower precedence can now be overridden to be a pass-through no-op by setting the variable to an empty string.
A new "^{/!-}" notation can be used to name a commit that is reachable from that does not match the given .
The "user.useConfigOnly" configuration variable can be used to force the user to always set user.email & user.name configuration variables, serving as a reminder for those who work on multiple projects and do not want to put these in their $HOME/.gitconfig.
"git fetch" and friends that make network connections can now be told to only use ipv4 (or ipv6).
Some authentication methods do not need username or password, but libcurl needs some hint that it needs to perform authentication. Supplying an empty username and password string is a valid way to do so, but you can set the http.[.]emptyAuth configuration variable to achieve the same, if you find it cleaner.
You can now set http.[.]pinnedpubkey to specify the pinned public key when building with recent enough versions of libcURL.
The configuration system has been taught to phrase where it found a bad configuration variable in a better way in its error messages. "git config" learnt a new "--show-origin" option to indicate where the values come from.
The "credential-cache" daemon process used to run in whatever directory it happened to start in, but this made umount(2)ing the filesystem that houses the repository harder; now the process chdir()s to the directory that house its own socket on startup.
When "git submodule update" did not result in fetching the commit object in the submodule that is referenced by the superproject, the command learned to retry another fetch, specifically asking for that commit that may not be connected to the refs it usually fetches.
"git merge-recursive" learned "--no-renames" option to disable its rename detection logic.
Across the transition at around Git version 2.0, the user used to get a pretty loud warning when running "git push" without setting push.default configuration variable. We no longer warn because the transition was completed a long time ago.
README has been renamed to README.md and its contents got tweaked slightly to make it easier on the eyes.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
Add a framework to spawn a group of processes in parallel, and use it to run "git fetch --recurse-submodules" in parallel.
A slight update to the Makefile to mark ".PHONY" targets as such correctly.
In-core storage of the reverse index for .pack files (which lets you go from a pack offset to an object name) has been streamlined.
d95138e6 (setup: set env $GIT_WORK_TREE when work tree is set, like $GIT_DIR, 2015-06-26) attempted to work around a glitch in alias handling by overwriting GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable to affect subprocesses when set_git_work_tree() gets called, which resulted in a rather unpleasant regression to "clone" and "init". Try to address the same issue by always restoring the environment and respawning the real underlying command when handling alias.
The low-level code that is used to create symbolic references has been updated to share more code with the code that deals with normal references.
strbuf_getline() and friends have been redefined to make it easier to identify which callsite of (new) strbuf_getline_lf() should allow and silently ignore carriage-return at the end of the line to help users on DOSsy systems.
"git shortlog" used to accumulate various pieces of information regardless of what was asked to be shown in the final output. It has been optimized by noticing what need not to be collected (e.g. there is no need to collect the log messages when showing only the number of changes).
"git checkout $branch" (and other operations that share the same underlying machinery) has been optimized.
Automated tests in Travis CI environment has been optimized by persisting runtime statistics of previous "prove" run, executing tests that take longer before other ones; this reduces the total wallclock time.
Test scripts have been updated to remove assumptions that are not portable between Git for POSIX and Git for Windows, or to skip ones with expectations that are not satisfiable on Git for Windows.
Some calls to strcpy(3) triggers a false warning from static analyzers that are less intelligent than humans, and reducing the number of these false hits helps us notice real issues. A few calls to strcpy(3) in a couple of protrams that are already safe has been rewritten to avoid false warnings.
The "name_path" API was an attempt to reduce the need to construct the full path out of a series of path components while walking a tree hierarchy, but over time made less efficient because the path needs to be flattened, e.g. to be compared with another path that is already flat. The API has been removed and its users have been rewritten to simplify the overall code complexity.
Help those who debug http(s) part of the system. (merge 0054045 sp/remote-curl-ssl-strerror later to maint).
The internal API to interact with "remote.*" configuration variables has been streamlined.
The ref-filter's format-parsing code has been refactored, in preparation for "branch --format" and friends.
Traditionally, the tests that try commands that work on the contents in the working tree were named with "worktree" in their filenames, but with the recent addition of "git worktree" subcommand, whose tests are also named similarly, it has become harder to tell them apart. The traditional tests have been renamed to use "work-tree" instead in an attempt to differentiate them. (merge 5549029 mg/work-tree-tests later to maint).
Many codepaths forget to check return value from git_config_set(); the function is made to die() to make sure we do not proceed when setting a configuration variable failed. (merge 3d18064 ps/config-error later to maint).
Handling of errors while writing into our internal asynchronous process has been made more robust, which reduces flakiness in our tests. (merge 43f3afc jk/epipe-in-async later to maint).
There is a new DEVELOPER knob that enables many compiler warning options in the Makefile.
The way the test scripts configure the Apache web server has been updated to work also for Apache 2.4 running on RedHat derived distros.
Out of maintenance gcc on OSX 10.6 fails to compile the code in 'master'; work it around by using clang by default on the platform.
The "name_path" API was an attempt to reduce the need to construct the full path out of a series of path components while walking a tree hierarchy, but over time made less efficient because the path needs to be flattened, e.g. to be compared with another path that is already flat, in many cases. The API has been removed and its users have been rewritten to simplify the overall code complexity. This incidentally also closes some heap-corruption holes.
Recent versions of GNU grep is pickier than before to decide if a file is "binary" and refuse to give line-oriented hits when we expect it to, unless explicitly told with "-a" option. As our scripted Porcelains use sane_grep wrapper for line-oriented data, even when the line may contain non-ASCII payload we took from end-user data, use "grep -a" to implement sane_grep wrapper when using an implementation of "grep" that takes the "-a" option.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes since v2.7:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.7 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).
An earlier change in 2.5.x-era broke users' hooks and aliases by exporting GIT_WORK_TREE to point at the root of the working tree, interfering when they tried to use a different working tree without setting GIT_WORK_TREE environment themselves.
The "exclude_list" structure has the usual "alloc, nr" pair of fields to be used by ALLOC_GROW(), but clear_exclude_list() forgot to reset 'alloc' to 0 when it cleared 'nr' to discard the managed array.
Paths that have been told the index about with "add -N" are not quite yet in the index, but a few commands behaved as if they already are in a harmful way.
"git send-email" was confused by escaped quotes stored in the alias files saved by "mutt", which has been corrected.
A few non-portable C construct have been spotted by clang compiler and have been fixed.
The documentation has been updated to hint the connection between the '--signoff' option and DCO.
"git reflog" incorrectly assumed that all objects that used to be at the tip of a ref must be commits, which caused it to segfault.
The ignore mechanism saw a few regressions around untracked file listing and sparse checkout selection areas in 2.7.0; the change that is responsible for the regression has been reverted.
Some codepaths used fopen(3) when opening a fixed path in $GIT_DIR (e.g. COMMIT_EDITMSG) that is meant to be left after the command is done. This however did not work well if the repository is set to be shared with core.sharedRepository and the umask of the previous user is tighter. They have been made to work better by calling unlink(2) and retrying after fopen(3) fails with EPERM.
Asking gitweb for a nonexistent commit left a warning in the server log.
Somebody may want to follow this up with an additional test, perhaps? IIRC, we do test that no Perl warnings are given to the server log, so this should have been caught if our test coverage were good.
"git rebase", unlike all other callers of "gc --auto", did not ignore the exit code from "gc --auto".
Many codepaths that run "gc --auto" before exiting kept packfiles mapped and left the file descriptors to them open, which was not friendly to systems that cannot remove files that are open. They now close the packs before doing so.
A recent optimization to filter-branch in v2.7.0 introduced a regression when --prune-empty filter is used, which has been corrected.
The description for SANITY prerequisite the test suite uses has been clarified both in the comment and in the implementation.
"git tag" started listing a tag "foo" as "tags/foo" when a branch named "foo" exists in the same repository; remove this unnecessary disambiguation, which is a regression introduced in v2.7.0.
The way "git svn" uses auth parameter was broken by Subversion 1.9.0 and later.
The "split" subcommand of "git subtree" (in contrib/) incorrectly skipped merges when it shouldn't, which was corrected.
A few options of "git diff" did not work well when the command was run from a subdirectory.
The command line completion learned a handful of additional options and command specific syntax.
dirname() emulation has been added, as Msys2 lacks it.
The underlying machinery used by "ls-files -o" and other commands has been taught not to create empty submodule ref cache for a directory that is not a submodule. This removes a ton of wasted CPU cycles.
"git worktree" had a broken code that attempted to auto-fix possible inconsistency that results from end-users moving a worktree to different places without telling Git (the original repository needs to maintain back-pointers to its worktrees, but "mv" run by end-users who are not familiar with that fact will obviously not adjust them), which actually made things worse when triggered.
The low-level merge machinery has been taught to use CRLF line termination when inserting conflict markers to merged contents that are themselves CRLF line-terminated.
"git push --force-with-lease" has been taught to report if the push needed to force (or fast-forwarded).
The emulated "yes" command used in our test scripts has been tweaked not to spend too much time generating unnecessary output that is not used, to help those who test on Windows where it would not stop until it fills the pipe buffer due to lack of SIGPIPE.
The documentation for "git clean" has been corrected; it mentioned that .git/modules/* are removed by giving two "-f", which has never been the case.
The vimdiff backend for "git mergetool" has been tweaked to arrange and number buffers in the order that would match the expectation of majority of people who read left to right, then top down and assign buffers 1 2 3 4 "mentally" to local base remote merge windows based on that order.
"git show 'HEAD:Foo[BAR]Baz'" did not interpret the argument as a rev, i.e. the object named by the the pathname with wildcard characters in a tree object. (merge aac4fac nd/dwim-wildcards-as-pathspecs later to maint).
"git rev-parse --git-common-dir" used in the worktree feature misbehaved when run from a subdirectory. (merge 17f1365 nd/git-common-dir-fix later to maint).
"git worktree add -B " did not work.
The "v(iew)" subcommand of the interactive "git am -i" command was broken in 2.6.0 timeframe when the command was rewritten in C. (merge 708b8cc jc/am-i-v-fix later to maint).
"git merge-tree" used to mishandle "both sides added" conflict with its own "create a fake ancestor file that has the common parts of what both sides have added and do a 3-way merge" logic; this has been updated to use the usual "3-way merge with an empty blob as the fake common ancestor file" approach used in the rest of the system. (merge 907681e jk/no-diff-emit-common later to maint).
The memory ownership rule of fill_textconv() API, which was a bit tricky, has been documented a bit better. (merge a64e6a4 jk/more-comments-on-textconv later to maint).
Update various codepaths to avoid manually-counted malloc(). (merge 08c95df jk/tighten-alloc later to maint).
The documentation did not clearly state that the 'simple' mode is now the default for "git push" when push.default configuration is not set. (merge f6b1fb3 mm/push-simple-doc later to maint).
Recent versions of GNU grep are pickier when their input contains arbitrary binary data, which some of our tests uses. Rewrite the tests to sidestep the problem. (merge 3b1442d jk/grep-binary-workaround-in-test later to maint).
A helper function "git submodule" uses since v2.7.0 to list the modules that match the pathspec argument given to its subcommands (e.g. "submodule add ") has been fixed. (merge 2b56bb7 sb/submodule-module-list-fix later to maint).
"git config section.var value" to set a value in per-repository configuration file failed when it was run outside any repository, but didn't say the reason correctly. (merge 638fa62 js/config-set-in-non-repository later to maint).
The code to read the pack data using the offsets stored in the pack idx file has been made more carefully check the validity of the data in the idx. (merge 7465feb jk/pack-idx-corruption-safety later to maint).
Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates (merge f459823 ak/extract-argv0-last-dir-sep later to maint). (merge 63ca1c0 ak/git-strip-extension-from-dashed-command later to maint). (merge 4867f11 ps/plug-xdl-merge-leak later to maint). (merge 4938686 dt/initial-ref-xn-commit-doc later to maint). (merge 9537f21 ma/update-hooks-sample-typofix later to maint).

New in Git 2.7.4 (Mar 17, 2016)

New in Git 2.7.3 (Mar 11, 2016)

Fixes:
Traditionally, the tests that try commands that work on the contents in the working tree were named with "worktree" in their filenames, but with the recent addition of "git worktree" subcommand, whose tests are also named similarly, it has become harder to tell them apart. The traditional tests have been renamed to use "work-tree" instead in an attempt to differentiate them.
Many codepaths forget to check return value from git_config_set(); the function is made to die() to make sure we do not proceed when setting a configuration variable failed.
Handling of errors while writing into our internal asynchronous process has been made more robust, which reduces flakiness in our tests.
"git show 'HEAD:Foo[BAR]Baz'" did not interpret the argument as a rev, i.e. the object named by the the pathname with wildcard characters in a tree object.
"git rev-parse --git-common-dir" used in the worktree feature misbehaved when run from a subdirectory.
The "v(iew)" subcommand of the interactive "git am -i" command was broken in 2.6.0 timeframe when the command was rewritten in C.
"git merge-tree" used to mishandle "both sides added" conflict with its own "create a fake ancestor file that has the common parts of what both sides have added and do a 3-way merge" logic; this has been updated to use the usual "3-way merge with an empty blob as the fake common ancestor file" approach used in the rest of the system.
The memory ownership rule of fill_textconv() API, which was a bit tricky, has been documented a bit better.
The documentation did not clearly state that the 'simple' mode is now the default for "git push" when push.default configuration is not set.
Recent versions of GNU grep are pickier when their input contains arbitrary binary data, which some of our tests uses. Rewrite the tests to sidestep the problem.
A helper function "git submodule" uses since v2.7.0 to list the modules that match the pathspec argument given to its subcommands (e.g. "submodule add ") has been fixed.
"git config section.var value" to set a value in per-repository configuration file failed when it was run outside any repository, but didn't say the reason correctly.
The code to read the pack data using the offsets stored in the pack idx file has been made more carefully check the validity of the data in the idx.
Also includes documentation and test updates.

New in Git 2.8.0 RC 0 (Feb 27, 2016)

Backward compatibility note:
The rsync:// transport has been removed.
Updates:
UI, Workflows & Features
It turns out "git clone" over rsync transport has been broken when the source repository has packed references for a long time, and nobody noticed nor complained about it.
"branch --delete" has "branch -d" but "push --delete" does not.
"git blame" learned to produce the progress eye-candy when it takes too much time before emitting the first line of the result.
"git grep" can now be configured (or told from the command line) how many threads to use when searching in the working tree files.
Some "git notes" operations, e.g. "git log --notes=", should be able to read notes from any tree-ish that is shaped like a notes tree, but the notes infrastructure required that the argument must be a ref under refs/notes/. Loosen it to require a valid ref only when the operation would update the notes (in which case we must have a place to store the updated notes tree, iow, a ref).
"git grep" by default does not fall back to its "--no-index" behaviour outside a directory under Git's control (otherwise the user may by mistake end up running a huge recursive search); with a new configuration (set in $HOME/.gitconfig--by definition this cannot be set in the config file per project), this safety can be disabled.
"git pull --rebase" has been extended to allow invoking "rebase -i".
"git p4" learned to cope with the type of a file getting changed.
"git format-patch" learned to notice format.outputDirectory configuration variable. This allows "-o " option to be omitted on the command line if you always use the same directory in your workflow.
"interpret-trailers" has been taught to optionally update a file in place, instead of always writing the result to the standard output.
Many commands that read files that are expected to contain text that is generated (or can be edited) by the end user to control their behaviour (e.g. "git grep -f ") have been updated to be more tolerant to lines that are terminated with CRLF (they used to treat such a line to contain payload that ends with CR, which is usually not what the users expect).
"git notes merge" used to limit the source of the merged notes tree to somewhere under refs/notes/ hierarchy, which was too limiting when inventing a workflow to exchange notes with remote repositories using remote-tracking notes trees (located in e.g. refs/remote-notes/ or somesuch).
"git ls-files" learned a new "--eol" option to help diagnose end-of-line problems.
"ls-remote" learned an option to show which branch the remote repository advertises as its primary by pointing its HEAD at.
New http.proxyAuthMethod configuration variable can be used to specify what authentication method to use, as a way to work around proxies that do not give error response expected by libcurl when CURLAUTH_ANY is used. Also, the codepath for proxy authentication has been taught to use credential API to store the authentication material in user's keyrings.
Update the untracked cache subsystem and change its primary UI from "git update-index" to "git config".
There were a few "now I am doing this thing" progress messages in the TCP connection code that can be triggered by setting a verbose option internally in the code, but "git fetch -v" and friends never passed the verbose option down to that codepath.
Clean/smudge filters defined in a configuration file of lower precedence can now be overridden to be a pass-through no-op by setting the variable to an empty string.
A new "^{/!-}" notation can be used to name a commit that is reachable from that does not match the given .
The "user.useConfigOnly" configuration variable can be used to force the user to always set user.email & user.name configuration variables, serving as a reminder for those who work on multiple projects and do not want to put these in their $HOME/.gitconfig.
"git fetch" and friends that make network connections can now be told to only use ipv4 (or ipv6).
Some authentication methods do not need username or password, but libcurl needs some hint that it needs to perform authentication. Supplying an empty username and password string is a valid way to do so, but you can set the http.[.]emptyAuth configuration variable to achieve the same, if you find it cleaner.
You can now set http.[.]pinnedpubkey to specify the pinned public key when building with recent enough versions of libcURL.
The configuration system has been taught to phrase where it found a bad configuration variable in a better way in its error messages. "git config" learnt a new "--show-origin" option to indicate where the values come from.
The "credential-cache" daemon process used to run in whatever directory it happened to start in, but this made umount(2)ing the filesystem that houses the repository harder; now the process chdir()s to the directory that house its own socket on startup.
When "git submodule update" did not result in fetching the commit object in the submodule that is referenced by the superproject, the command learned to retry another fetch, specifically asking for that commit that may not be connected to the refs it usually fetches.
"git merge-recursive" learned "--no-renames" option to disable its rename detection logic.
Across the transition at around Git version 2.0, the user used to get a pretty loud warning when running "git push" without setting push.default configuration variable. We no longer warn, given that the transition is over long time ago.
README has been renamed to README.md and its contents got tweaked slightly to make it easier on the eyes.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
Add a framework to spawn a group of processes in parallel, and use it to run "git fetch --recurse-submodules" in parallel.
A slight update to the Makefile to mark "phoney" targets as such correctly.
In-core storage of the reverse index for .pack files (which lets you go from a pack offset to an object name) has been streamlined.
d95138e6 (setup: set env $GIT_WORK_TREE when work tree is set, like $GIT_DIR, 2015-06-26) attempted to work around a glitch in alias handling by overwriting GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable to affect subprocesses when set_git_work_tree() gets called, which resulted in a rather unpleasant regression to "clone" and "init". Try to address the same issue by always restoring the environment and respawning the real underlying command when handling alias.
The low-level code that is used to create symbolic references has been updated to share more code with the code that deals with normal references.
strbuf_getline() and friends have been redefined to make it easier to identify which callsite of (new) strbuf_getline_lf() should allow and silently ignore carriage-return at the end of the line to help users on DOSsy systems.
"git shortlog" used to accumulate various pieces of information regardless of what was asked to be shown in the final output. It has been optimized by noticing what need not to be collected (e.g. there is no need to collect the log messages when showing only the number of changes).
"git checkout $branch" (and other operations that share the same underlying machinery) has been optimized.
Automated tests in Travis CI environment has been optimized by persisting runtime statistics of previous "prove" run, executing tests that take longer before other ones; this reduces the total wallclock time.
Test scripts have been updated to remove assumptions that are not portable between Git for POSIX and Git for Windows, or to skip ones with expectations that are not satisfiable on Git for Windows.
Some calls to strcpy(3) triggers a false warning from static analysers that are less intelligent than humans, and reducing the number of these false hits helps us notice real issues. A few calls to strcpy(3) in test-path-utils that are already safe has been rewritten to avoid false wanings.
Some calls to strcpy(3) triggers a false warning from static analysers that are less intelligent than humans, and reducing the number of these false hits helps us notice real issues. A few calls to strcpy(3) in "git rerere" that are already safe has been rewritten to avoid false wanings.
The "name_path" API was an attempt to reduce the need to construct the full path out of a series of path components while walking a tree hierarchy, but over time made less efficient because the path needs to be flattened, e.g. to be compared with another path that is already flat. The API has been removed and its users have been rewritten to simplify the overall code complexity.
Help those who debug http(s) part of the system. (merge 0054045 sp/remote-curl-ssl-strerror later to maint).
The internal API to interact with "remote.*" configuration variables has been streamlined.
The ref-filter's format-parsing code has been refactored, in preparation for "branch --format" and friends.
Traditionally, the tests that try commands that work on the contents in the working tree were named with "worktree" in their filenames, but with the recent addition of "git worktree" subcommand, whose tests are also named similarly, it has become harder to tell them apart. The traditional tests have been renamed to use "work-tree" instead in an attempt to differentiate them. (merge 5549029 mg/work-tree-tests later to maint).
Many codepaths forget to check return value from git_config_set(); the function is made to die() to make sure we do not proceed when setting a configuration variable failed. (merge 3d18064 ps/config-error later to maint).
Handling of errors while writing into our internal asynchronous process has been made more robust, which reduces flakiness in our tests. (merge 43f3afc jk/epipe-in-async later to maint).
There is a new DEVELOPER knob that enables many compiler warning options in the Makefile.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.7 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).
An earlier change in 2.5.x-era broke users' hooks and aliases by exporting GIT_WORK_TREE to point at the root of the working tree, interfering when they tried to use a different working tree without setting GIT_WORK_TREE environment themselves.
The "exclude_list" structure has the usual "alloc, nr" pair of fields to be used by ALLOC_GROW(), but clear_exclude_list() forgot to reset 'alloc' to 0 when it cleared 'nr' to discard the managed array.
Paths that have been told the index about with "add -N" are not quite yet in the index, but a few commands behaved as if they already are in a harmful way.
"git send-email" was confused by escaped quotes stored in the alias files saved by "mutt", which has been corrected.
A few unportable C construct have been spotted by clang compiler and have been fixed.
The documentation has been updated to hint the connection between the '--signoff' option and DCO.
"git reflog" incorrectly assumed that all objects that used to be at the tip of a ref must be commits, which caused it to segfault.
The ignore mechanism saw a few regressions around untracked file listing and sparse checkout selection areas in 2.7.0; the change that is responsible for the regression has been reverted.
Some codepaths used fopen(3) when opening a fixed path in $GIT_DIR (e.g. COMMIT_EDITMSG) that is meant to be left after the command is done. This however did not work well if the repository is set to be shared with core.sharedRepository and the umask of the previous user is tighter. They have been made to work better by calling unlink(2) and retrying after fopen(3) fails with EPERM.
Asking gitweb for a nonexistent commit left a warning in the server log.
Somebody may want to follow this up with an additional test, perhaps? IIRC, we do test that no Perl warnings are given to the server log, so this should have been caught if our test coverage were good.
"git rebase", unlike all other callers of "gc --auto", did not ignore the exit code from "gc --auto".
Many codepaths that run "gc --auto" before exiting kept packfiles mapped and left the file descriptors to them open, which was not friendly to systems that cannot remove files that are open. They now close the packs before doing so.
A recent optimization to filter-branch in v2.7.0 introduced a regression when --prune-empty filter is used, which has been corrected.
The description for SANITY prerequisite the test suite uses has been clarified both in the comment and in the implementation.
"git tag" started listing a tag "foo" as "tags/foo" when a branch named "foo" exists in the same repository; remove this unnecessary disambiguation, which is a regression introduced in v2.7.0.
The way "git svn" uses auth parameter was broken by Subversion 1.9.0 and later.
The "split" subcommand of "git subtree" (in contrib/) incorrectly skipped merges when it shouldn't, which was corrected.
A few options of "git diff" did not work well when the command was run from a subdirectory.
The command line completion learned a handful of additional options and command specific syntax.
dirname() emulation has been added, as Msys2 lacks it.
The underlying machinery used by "ls-files -o" and other commands have been taught not to create empty submodule ref cache for a directory that is not a submodule. This removes a ton of wasted CPU cycles.
"git worktree" had a broken code that attempted to auto-fix possible inconsistency that results from end-users moving a worktree to different places without telling Git (the original repository needs to maintain backpointers to its worktrees, but "mv" run by end-users who are not familiar with that fact will obviously not adjust them), which actually made things worse when triggered.
The low-level merge machinery has been taught to use CRLF line termination when inserting conflict markers to merged contents that are themselves CRLF line-terminated.
"git push --force-with-lease" has been taught to report if the push needed to force (or fast-forwarded).
The emulated "yes" command used in our test scripts has been tweaked not to spend too much time generating unnecessary output that is not used, to help those who test on Windows where it would not stop until it fills the pipe buffer due to lack of SIGPIPE.
The documentation for "git clean" has been corrected; it mentioned that .git/modules/* are removed by giving two "-f", which has never been the case.
The vimdiff backend for "git mergetool" has been tweaked to arrange and number buffers in the order that would match the expectation of majority of people who read left to right, then top down and assign buffers 1 2 3 4 "mentally" to local base remote merge windows based on that order.
"git show 'HEAD:Foo[BAR]Baz'" did not interpret the argument as a rev, i.e. the object named by the the pathname with wildcard characters in a tree object. (merge aac4fac nd/dwim-wildcards-as-pathspecs later to maint).
"git rev-parse --git-common-dir" used in the worktree feature misbehaved when run from a subdirectory. (merge 17f1365 nd/git-common-dir-fix later to maint).
Another try to add support to the ignore mechanism that lets you say "this is excluded" and then later say "oh, no, this part (that is a subset of the previous part) is not excluded".
"git worktree add -B " did not work.
The "v(iew)" subcommand of the interactive "git am -i" command was broken in 2.6.0 timeframe when the command was rewritten in C. (merge 708b8cc jc/am-i-v-fix later to maint).
"git merge-tree" used to mishandle "both sides added" conflict with its own "create a fake ancestor file that has the common parts of what both sides have added and do a 3-way merge" logic; this has been updated to use the usual "3-way merge with an empty blob as the fake common ancestor file" approach used in the rest of the system. (merge 907681e jk/no-diff-emit-common later to maint).
The memory ownership rule of fill_textconv() API, which was a bit tricky, has been documented a bit better. (merge a64e6a4 jk/more-comments-on-textconv later to maint).
Update various codepaths to avoid manually-counted malloc(). (merge 08c95df jk/tighten-alloc later to maint).
The documentation did not clearly state that the 'simple' mode is now the default for "git push" when push.default configuration is not set. (merge f6b1fb3 mm/push-simple-doc later to maint).
Recent versions of GNU grep are pickier when their input contains arbitrary binary data, which some of our tests uses. Rewrite the tests to sidestep the problem. (merge 3b1442d jk/grep-binary-workaround-in-test later to maint).
A helper function "git submodule" uses since v2.7.0 to list the modules that match the pathspec argument given to its subcommands (e.g. "submodule add ") has been fixed. (merge 2b56bb7 sb/submodule-module-list-fix later to maint).
"git config section.var value" to set a value in per-repository configuration file failed when it was run outside any repository, but didn't say the reason correctly. (merge 638fa62 js/config-set-in-non-repository later to maint).
Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates (merge f459823 ak/extract-argv0-last-dir-sep later to maint). (merge 63ca1c0 ak/git-strip-extension-from-dashed-command later to maint). (merge 4867f11 ps/plug-xdl-merge-leak later to maint). (merge 4938686 dt/initial-ref-xn-commit-doc later to maint). (merge 9537f21 ma/update-hooks-sample-typofix later to maint).

New in Git 2.7.2 (Feb 23, 2016)

New in Git 2.7.1 (Feb 21, 2016)

Fixes since v2.7:
An earlier change in 2.5.x-era broke users' hooks and aliases by exporting GIT_WORK_TREE to point at the root of the working tree, interfering when they tried to use a different working tree without setting GIT_WORK_TREE environment themselves.
The "exclude_list" structure has the usual "alloc, nr" pair of fields to be used by ALLOC_GROW(), but clear_exclude_list() forgot to reset 'alloc' to 0 when it cleared 'nr' to discard the managed array.
"git send-email" was confused by escaped quotes stored in the alias files saved by "mutt", which has been corrected.
A few unportable C construct have been spotted by clang compiler and have been fixed.
The documentation has been updated to hint the connection between the '--signoff' option and DCO.
"git reflog" incorrectly assumed that all objects that used to be at the tip of a ref must be commits, which caused it to segfault.
The ignore mechanism saw a few regressions around untracked file listing and sparse checkout selection areas in 2.7.0; the change that is responsible for the regression has been reverted.
Some codepaths used fopen(3) when opening a fixed path in $GIT_DIR (e.g. COMMIT_EDITMSG) that is meant to be left after the command is done. This however did not work well if the repository is set to be shared with core.sharedRepository and the umask of the previous user is tighter. They have been made to work better by calling unlink(2) and retrying after fopen(3) fails with EPERM.
Asking gitweb for a nonexistent commit left a warning in the server log.
"git rebase", unlike all other callers of "gc --auto", did not ignore the exit code from "gc --auto".
Many codepaths that run "gc --auto" before exiting kept packfiles mapped and left the file descriptors to them open, which was not friendly to systems that cannot remove files that are open. They now close the packs before doing so.
A recent optimization to filter-branch in v2.7.0 introduced a regression when --prune-empty filter is used, which has been corrected.
The description for SANITY prerequisite the test suite uses has been clarified both in the comment and in the implementation.
"git tag" started listing a tag "foo" as "tags/foo" when a branch named "foo" exists in the same repository; remove this unnecessary disambiguation, which is a regression introduced in v2.7.0.
The way "git svn" uses auth parameter was broken by Subversion 1.9.0 and later.
The "split" subcommand of "git subtree" (in contrib/) incorrectly skipped merges when it shouldn't, which was corrected.
A few options of "git diff" did not work well when the command was run from a subdirectory.
dirname() emulation has been added, as Msys2 lacks it.
The underlying machinery used by "ls-files -o" and other commands have been taught not to create empty submodule ref cache for a directory that is not a submodule. This removes a ton of wasted CPU cycles.
Drop a few old "todo" items by deciding that the change one of them suggests is not such a good idea, and doing the change the other one suggested to do.
Documentation for "git fetch --depth" has been updated for clarity.
The command line completion learned a handful of additional options and command specific syntax.
Also includes a handful of documentation and test updates.

New in Git 2.7.1 RC (Feb 6, 2016)

Fixes since v2.7:
An earlier change in 2.5.x-era broke users' hooks and aliases by exporting GIT_WORK_TREE to point at the root of the working tree, interfering when they tried to use a different working tree without setting GIT_WORK_TREE environment themselves.
The "exclude_list" structure has the usual "alloc, nr" pair of fields to be used by ALLOC_GROW(), but clear_exclude_list() forgot to reset 'alloc' to 0 when it cleared 'nr' to discard the managed array.
"git send-email" was confused by escaped quotes stored in the alias files saved by "mutt", which has been corrected.
A few unportable C construct have been spotted by clang compiler and have been fixed.
The documentation has been updated to hint the connection between the '--signoff' option and DCO.
"git reflog" incorrectly assumed that all objects that used to be at the tip of a ref must be commits, which caused it to segfault.
The ignore mechanism saw a few regressions around untracked file listing and sparse checkout selection areas in 2.7.0; the change that is responsible for the regression has been reverted.
Some codepaths used fopen(3) when opening a fixed path in $GIT_DIR (e.g. COMMIT_EDITMSG) that is meant to be left after the command is done. This however did not work well if the repository is set to be shared with core.sharedRepository and the umask of the previous user is tighter. They have been made to work better by calling unlink(2) and retrying after fopen(3) fails with EPERM.
Asking gitweb for a nonexistent commit left a warning in the server log.
"git rebase", unlike all other callers of "gc --auto", did not ignore the exit code from "gc --auto".
Many codepaths that run "gc --auto" before exiting kept packfiles mapped and left the file descriptors to them open, which was not friendly to systems that cannot remove files that are open. They now close the packs before doing so.
A recent optimization to filter-branch in v2.7.0 introduced a regression when --prune-empty filter is used, which has been corrected.
The description for SANITY prerequisite the test suite uses has been clarified both in the comment and in the implementation.
"git tag" started listing a tag "foo" as "tags/foo" when a branch named "foo" exists in the same repository; remove this unnecessary disambiguation, which is a regression introduced in v2.7.0.
The way "git svn" uses auth parameter was broken by Subversion 1.9.0 and later.
The "split" subcommand of "git subtree" (in contrib/) incorrectly skipped merges when it shouldn't, which was corrected.
A few options of "git diff" did not work well when the command was run from a subdirectory.
dirname() emulation has been added, as Msys2 lacks it.
The underlying machinery used by "ls-files -o" and other commands have been taught not to create empty submodule ref cache for a directory that is not a submodule. This removes a ton of wasted CPU cycles.
Drop a few old "todo" items by deciding that the change one of them suggests is not such a good idea, and doing the change the other one suggested to do.
Documentation for "git fetch --depth" has been updated for clarity.
The command line completion learned a handful of additional options and command specific syntax.
Also includes a handful of documentation and test updates.

New in Git 2.7.0 (Jan 5, 2016)

UI, Workflows & Features:
The appearance of "gitk", particularly on high DPI monitors, have been improved. "gitk" also comes with an undated translation for Swedish and Japanese.
"git remote" learned "get-url" subcommand to show the URL for a given remote name used for fetching and pushing.
There was no way to defeat a configured rebase.autostash variable from the command line, as "git rebase --no-autostash" was missing.
"git log --date=local" used to only show the normal (default) format in the local timezone. The command learned to take 'local' as an instruction to use the local timezone with other formats,
The refs used during a "git bisect" session is now per-worktree so that independent bisect sessions can be done in different worktrees created with "git worktree add".
Users who are too busy to type three extra keystrokes to ask for "git stash show -p" can now set stash.showPatch configuration variable to true to always see the actual patch, not just the list of paths affected with feel for the extent of damage via diffstat.
"quiltimport" allows to specify the series file by honoring the $QUILT_SERIES environment and also --series command line option.
The use of 'good/bad' in "git bisect" made it confusing to use when hunting for a state change that is not a regression (e.g. bugfix). The command learned 'old/new' and then allows the end user to say e.g. "bisect start --term-old=fast --term-new=slow" to find a performance regression.
"git interpret-trailers" can now run outside of a Git repository.
"git p4" learned to reencode the pathname it uses to communicate with the p4 depot with a new option.
Give progress meter to "git filter-branch".
Allow a later "!/abc/def" to override an earlier "/abc" that appears in the same .gitignore file to make it easier to express "everything in /abc directory is ignored, except for ...".
Teach "git p4" to send large blobs outside the repository by talking to Git LFS.
Prepare for Git on-disk repository representation to undergo backward incompatible changes by introducing a new repository format version "1", with an extension mechanism.
"git worktree" learned a "list" subcommand.
"git clone --dissociate" learned that it can be used even when "--reference" was not used at the same time.
"git blame" learnt to take "--first-parent" and "--reverse" at the same time when it makes sense.
"git checkout" did not follow the usual "--[no-]progress" convention and implemented only "--quiet" that is essentially a superset of "--no-progress". Extend the command to support the usual "--[no-]progress".
The semantics of transfer.hideRefs configuration variable have been extended to work better with the ref "namespace" feature that lets you throw unrelated bunches of repositories in a single physical repository and virtually serve them as separate ones.
send-email config variables whose values are pathnames now go through the ~username/ expansion.
bash completion learnt to TAB-complete recipient addresses given to send-email.
The credential-cache daemon can be told to ignore SIGHUP to work around issue when running Git from inside emacs.
"git push" learned new configuration for doing "--recurse-submodules" on each push.
"format-patch" has learned a new option to zero-out the commit object name on the mbox "From " line.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.:
The infrastructure to rewrite "git submodule" in C is being built incrementally. Let's polish these early parts well enough and make them graduate to 'next' and 'master', so that the more involved follow-up can start cooking on a solid ground.
Some features from "git tag -l" and "git branch -l" have been made available to "git for-each-ref" so that eventually the unified implementation can be shared across all three. The version merged to the 'master' branch earlier had a performance regression in "tag --contains", which has since been corrected.
Because "test_when_finished" in our test framework queues the clean-up tasks to be done in a shell variable, it should not be used inside a subshell. Add a mechanism to allow 'bash' to catch such uses, and fix the ones that were found.
The debugging infrastructure for pkt-line based communication has been improved to mark the side-band communication specifically.
Update "git branch" that list existing branches, using the ref-filter API that is shared with "git tag" and "git for-each-ref".
The test for various line-ending conversions has been enhanced.
A few test scripts around "git p4" have been improved for portability.
Many allocations that is manually counted (correctly) that are followed by strcpy/sprintf have been replaced with a less error prone constructs such as xstrfmt.
The internal stripspace() function has been moved to where it logically belongs to, i.e. strbuf API, and the command line parser of "git stripspace" has been updated to use the parse_options API.
"git am" used to spawn "git mailinfo" via run_command() API once per each patch, but learned to make a direct call to mailinfo() instead.
The implementation of "git mailinfo" was refactored so that a mailinfo() function can be directly called from inside a process.
With a "debug" helper, debugging of a single "git" invocation in our test scripts has become a lot easier.
The "configure" script did not test for -lpthread correctly, which upset some linkers.
Cross completed task off of subtree project's todo list.
Test cleanups for the subtree project.
Clean up style in an ancient test t9300.
Work around some test flakiness with p4d.
Fsck did not correctly detect a NUL-truncated header in a tag.
Use a safer behavior when we hit errors verifying remote certificates.
Speed up filter-branch for cases where we only care about rewriting commits, not tree data.
The parse-options API has been updated to make "-h" command line option work more consistently in all commands.
"git svn rebase/mkdirs" got optimized by keeping track of empty directories better.
Fix some racy client/server tests by treating SIGPIPE the same as a normal non-zero exit.
The necessary infrastructure to build topics using the free Travis CI has been added. Developers forking from this topic (and enabling Travis) can do their own builds, and we can turn on auto-builds for git/git (including build-status for pull requests that people open).
The write(2) emulation for Windows learned to set errno to EPIPE when necessary.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.6 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).
Very small number of options take a parameter that is optional (which is not a great UI element as they can only appear at the end of the command line). Add notice to documentation of each and every one of them.
"git blame --first-parent v1.0..v2.0" was not rejected but did not limit the blame to commits on the first parent chain.
"git subtree" (in contrib/) now can take whitespaces in the pathnames, not only in the in-tree pathname but the name of the directory that the repository is in.
The ssh transport, just like any other transport over the network, did not clear GIT_* environment variables, but it is possible to use SendEnv and AcceptEnv to leak them to the remote invocation of Git, which is not a good idea at all. Explicitly clear them just like we do for the local transport.
Correct "git p4 --detect-labels" so that it does not fail to create a tag that points at a commit that is also being imported.
The Makefile always runs the library archiver with hardcoded "crs" options, which was inconvenient for exotic platforms on which people want to use programs with totally different set of command line options.
Customization to change the behaviour with "make -w" and "make -s" in our Makefile was broken when they were used together.
Allocation related functions and stdio are unsafe things to call inside a signal handler, and indeed killing the pager can cause glibc to deadlock waiting on allocation mutex as our signal handler tries to free() some data structures in wait_for_pager(). Reduce these unsafe calls.
The way how --ref/--notes to specify the notes tree reference are DWIMmed was not clearly documented.
"git gc" used to barf when a symbolic ref has gone dangling (e.g. the branch that used to be your upstream's default when you cloned from it is now gone, and you did "fetch --prune").
"git clone --dissociate" runs a big "git repack" process at the end, and it helps to close file descriptors that are open on the packs and their idx files before doing so on filesystems that cannot remove a file that is still open.
Description of the "log.follow" configuration variable in "git log" documentation is now also copied to "git config" documentation.
"git rebase -i" had a minor regression recently, which stopped considering a line that begins with an indented '#' in its insn sheet not a comment. Further, the code was still too picky on Windows where CRLF left by the editor is turned into a trailing CR on the line read via the "read" built-in command of bash. Both of these issues are now fixed.
After "git checkout --detach", "git status" reported a fairly useless "HEAD detached at HEAD", instead of saying at which exact commit.
When "git send-email" wanted to talk over Net::SMTP::SSL, Net::Cmd::datasend() did not like to be fed too many bytes at the same time and failed to send messages. Send the payload one line at a time to work around the problem.
When "git am" was rewritten as a built-in, it stopped paying attention to user.signingkey, which was fixed.
It was not possible to use a repository-lookalike created by "git worktree add" as a local source of "git clone".
On a case insensitive filesystems, setting GIT_WORK_TREE variable using a random cases that does not agree with what the filesystem thinks confused Git that it wasn't inside the working tree.
Performance-measurement tests did not work without an installed Git.
A test script for the HTTP service had a timing dependent bug, which was fixed.
There were some classes of errors that "git fsck" diagnosed to its standard error that did not cause it to exit with non-zero status.
Work around "git p4" failing when the P4 depot records the contents in UTF-16 without UTF-16 BOM.
When "git gc --auto" is backgrounded, its diagnosis message is lost. Save it to a file in $GIT_DIR and show it next time the "gc --auto" is run.
The submodule code has been taught to work better with separate work trees created via "git worktree add".
"git gc" is safe to run anytime only because it has the built-in grace period to protect young objects. In order to run with no grace period, the user must make sure that the repository is quiescent.
A recent "filter-branch --msg-filter" broke skipping of the commit object header, which is fixed.
The normalize_ceiling_entry() function does not muck with the end of the path it accepts, and the real world callers do rely on that, but a test insisted that the function drops a trailing slash.
A test for interaction between untracked cache and sparse checkout added in Git 2.5 days were flaky.
A couple of commands still showed "[options]" in their usage string to note where options should come on their command line, but we spell that "[]" in most places these days.
The synopsis text and the usage string of subcommands that read list of things from the standard input are often shown as if they only take input from a file on a filesystem, which was misleading.
"git am -3" had a small regression where it is aborted in its error handling codepath when underlying merge-recursive failed in certain ways, as it assumed that the internal call to merge-recursive will never die, which is not the case (yet).
The linkage order of libraries was wrong in places around libcurl.
The name-hash subsystem that is used to cope with case insensitive filesystems keeps track of directories and their on-filesystem cases for all the paths in the index by holding a pointer to a randomly chosen cache entry that is inside the directory (for its ce->ce_name component). This pointer was not updated even when the cache entry was removed from the index, leading to use after free. This was fixed by recording the path for each directory instead of borrowing cache entries and restructuring the API somewhat.
"git merge-file" tried to signal how many conflicts it found, which obviously would not work well when there are too many of them.
The error message from "git blame --contents --reverse" incorrectly talked about "--contents --children".
"git imap-send" did not compile well with older version of cURL library.
Merging a branch that removes a path and another that changes the mode bits on the same path should have conflicted at the path, but it didn't and silently favoured the removal.
"git --literal-pathspecs add -u/-A" without any command line argument misbehaved ever since Git 2.0.
"git daemon" uses "run_command()" without "finish_command()", so it needs to release resources itself, which it forgot to do.
"git status --branch --short" accessed beyond the constant string "HEAD", which has been corrected.
We peek objects from submodule's object store by linking it to the list of alternate object databases, but the code to do so forgot to correctly initialize the list.
The code to prepare the working tree side of temporary directory for the "dir-diff" feature forgot that symbolic links need not be copied (or symlinked) to the temporary area, as the code already special cases and overwrites them. Besides, it was wrong to try computing the object name of the target of symbolic link, which may not even exist or may be a directory.
A Range: request can be responded with a full response and when asked properly libcurl knows how to strip the result down to the requested range. However, we were hand-crafting a range request and it did not kick in.
Having a leftover .idx file without corresponding .pack file in the repository hurts performance; "git gc" learned to prune them.
Apple's common crypto implementation of SHA1_Update() does not take more than 4GB at a time, and we now have a compile-time workaround for it.
Produce correct "dirty" marker for shell prompts, even when we are on an orphan or an unborn branch.
A build without NO_IPv6 used to use gethostbyname() when guessing user's hostname, instead of getaddrinfo() that is used in other codepaths in such a build.
The exit code of git-fsck did not reflect some types of errors found in packed objects, which has been corrected.
The helper used to iterate over loose object directories to prune stale objects did not closedir() immediately when it is done with a directory--a callback such as the one used for "git prune" may want to do rmdir(), but it would fail on open directory on platforms such as WinXP.
"git p4" used to import Perforce CLs that touch only paths outside the client spec as empty commits. It has been corrected to ignore them instead, with a new configuration git-p4.keepEmptyCommits as a backward compatibility knob.
The completion script (in contrib/) used to list "git column" (which is not an end-user facing command) as one of the choices (merge 160fcdb sg/completion-no-column later to maint).
The error reporting from "git send-email", when SMTP TLS fails, has been improved. (merge 9d60524 jk/send-email-ssl-errors later to maint).
When getpwuid() on the system returned NULL (e.g. the user is not in the /etc/passwd file or other uid-to-name mappings), the codepath to find who the user is to record it in the reflog barfed and died. Loosen the check in this codepath, which already accepts questionable ident string (e.g. host part of the e-mail address is obviously bogus), and in general when we operate fmt_ident() function in non-strict mode. (merge 92bcbb9 jk/ident-loosen-getpwuid later to maint).
"git symbolic-ref" forgot to report a failure with its exit status. (merge f91b273 jk/symbolic-ref-maint later to maint).
History traversal with "git log --source" that starts with an annotated tag failed to report the tag as "source", due to an old regression in the command line parser back in v2.2 days. (merge 728350b jk/pending-keep-tag-name later to maint).
"git p4" when interacting with multiple depots at the same time used to incorrectly drop changes.
Code clean-up, minor fixes etc.

New in Git 2.7 RC 0 (Dec 10, 2015)

UPDATES SINCE V2.6:
UI, Workflows & Features:
"git remote" learned "get-url" subcommand to show the URL for a given remote name used for fetching and pushing.
There was no way to defeat a configured rebase.autostash variable from the command line, as "git rebase --no-autostash" was missing.
"git log --date=local" used to only show the normal (default) format in the local timezone. The command learned to take 'local' as an instruction to use the local timezone with other formats,
The refs used during a "git bisect" session is now per-worktree so that independent bisect sessions can be done in different worktrees created with "git worktree add".
Users who are too busy to type three extra keystrokes to ask for "git stash show -p" can now set stash.showPatch configuration varible to true to always see the actual patch, not just the list of paths affected with feel for the extent of damage via diffstat.
"quiltimport" allows to specify the series file by honoring the $QUILT_SERIES environment and also --series command line option.
The use of 'good/bad' in "git bisect" made it confusing to use when hunting for a state change that is not a regression (e.g. bugfix). The command learned 'old/new' and then allows the end user to say e.g. "bisect start --term-old=fast --term-new=slow" to find a performance regression.
"git interpret-trailers" can now run outside of a Git repository.
"git p4" learned to reencode the pathname it uses to communicate with the p4 depot with a new option.
Give progress meter to "git filter-branch".
Allow a later "!/abc/def" to override an earlier "/abc" that appears in the same .gitignore file to make it easier to express "everything in /abc directory is ignored, except for ...".
Teach "git p4" to send large blobs outside the repository by talking to Git LFS.
Prepare for Git on-disk repository representation to undergo backward incompatible changes by introducing a new repository format version "1", with an extension mechanism. (merge 067fbd4 jk/repository-extension later to maint).
"git worktree" learned a "list" subcommand.
"git clone --dissociate" learned that it can be used even when "--reference" was not used at the same time.
"git blame" learnt to take "--first-parent" and "--reverse" at the same time when it makes sense.
"git checkout" did not follow the usual "--[no-]progress" convention and implemented only "--quiet" that is essentially a superset of "--no-progress". Extend the command to support the usual "--[no-]progress".
The semantics of tranfer.hideRefs configuration variable have been extended to work better with the ref "namespace" feature that lets you throw unrelated bunches of repositories in a single physical repository and virtually serve them as separate ones.
send-email config variables whose values are pathnames now go through the ~username/ expansion.
bash completion learnt to TAB-complete recipient addresses given to send-email.
The credential-cache daemon can be told to ignore SIGHUP to work around issue when running Git from inside emacs.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.:
The infrastructure to rewrite "git submodule" in C is being built incrementally. Let's polish these early parts well enough and make them graduate to 'next' and 'master', so that the more involved follow-up can start cooking on a solid ground.
Some features from "git tag -l" and "git branch -l" have been made available to "git for-each-ref" so that eventually the unified implementation can be shared across all three. The version merged to the 'master' branch earlier had a performance regression in "tag --contains", which has since been corrected.
Because "test_when_finished" in our test framework queues the clean-up tasks to be done in a shell variable, it should not be used inside a subshell. Add a mechanism to allow 'bash' to catch such uses, and fix the ones that were found. (merge 0968f12 jk/test-lint-forbid-when-finished-in-subshell later to maint).
The debugging infrastructure for pkt-line based communication has been improved to mark the side-band communication specifically. (merge fd89433 jk/async-pkt-line later to maint).
Update "git branch" that list existing branches, using the ref-filter API that is shared with "git tag" and "git for-each-ref".
The test for various line-ending conversions has been enhanced.
A few test scripts around "git p4" have been improved for portability.
Many allocations that is manually counted (correctly) that are followed by strcpy/sprintf have been replaced with a less error prone constructs such as xstrfmt.
The internal stripspace() function has been moved to where it logically belongs to, i.e. strbuf API, and the command line parser of "git stripspace" has been updated to use the parse_options API. (merge bed4452 tk/stripspace later to maint).
"git am" used to spawn "git mailinfo" via run_command() API once per each patch, but learned to make a direct call to mailinfo() instead.
The implementation of "git mailinfo" was refactored so that a mailinfo() function can be directly called from inside a process.
With a "debug" helper, debugging of a single "git" invocation in our test scripts has become a lot easier.
The "configure" script did not test for -lpthread correctly, which upset some linkers.
Cross completed task off of subtree project's todo list.
Test cleanups for the subtree project.
Clean up style in an ancient test t9300.
Work around some test flakiness with p4d.
Fsck did not correctly detect a NUL-truncated header in a tag.
Use a safer behavior when we hit errors verifying remote certificates.
Speed up filter-branch for cases where we only care about rewriting commits, not tree data.
The parse-options API has been updated to make "-h" command line option work more consistently in all commands.
"git svn rebase/mkdirs" got optimized by keeping track of empty directories better.
Fix some racy client/server tests by treating SIGPIPE the same as a normal non-zero exit.
The necessary infrastructure to build topics using the free Travis CI has been added. Developers forking from this topic (and enabling Travis) can do their own builds, and we can turn on auto-builds for git/git (including build-status for pull requests that people open).
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.6:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.6 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).
Very small number of options take a parameter that is optional (which is not a great UI element as they can only appear at the end of the command line). Add notice to documentation of each and every one of them. (merge 2b594bf mm/keyid-docs later to maint).
"git blame --first-parent v1.0..v2.0" was not rejected but did not limit the blame to commits on the first parent chain. (merge 95a4fb0 jk/blame-first-parent later to maint).
"git subtree" (in contrib/) now can take whitespaces in the pathnames, not only in the in-tree pathname but the name of the directory that the repository is in. (merge 5b6ab38 as/subtree-with-spaces later to maint).
The ssh transport, just like any other transport over the network, did not clear GIT_* environment variables, but it is possible to use SendEnv and AcceptEnv to leak them to the remote invocation of Git, which is not a good idea at all. Explicitly clear them just like we do for the local transport. (merge a48b409 jk/connect-clear-env later to maint).
Correct "git p4 --detect-labels" so that it does not fail to create a tag that points at a commit that is also being imported. (merge b43702a ld/p4-import-labels later to maint).
The Makefile always runs the library archiver with hardcoded "crs" options, which was inconvenient for exotic platforms on which people want to use programs with totally different set of command line options. (merge ac179b4 jw/make-arflags-customizable later to maint).
Customization to change the behaviour with "make -w" and "make -s" in our Makefile was broken when they were used together. (merge ef49e05 jk/make-findstring-makeflags-fix later to maint).
Allocation related functions and stdio are unsafe things to call inside a signal handler, and indeed killing the pager can cause glibc to deadlock waiting on allocation mutex as our signal handler tries to free() some data structures in wait_for_pager(). Reduce these unsafe calls. (merge 507d780 ti/glibc-stdio-mutex-from-signal-handler later to maint).
The way how --ref/--notes to specify the notes tree reference are DWIMmed was not clearly documented. (merge e14c92e jk/notes-dwim-doc later to maint).
"git gc" used to barf when a symbolic ref has gone dangling (e.g. the branch that used to be your upstream's default when you cloned from it is now gone, and you did "fetch --prune"). (merge 14886b4 js/gc-with-stale-symref later to maint).
"git clone --dissociate" runs a big "git repack" process at the end, and it helps to close file descriptors that are open on the packs and their idx files before doing so on filesystems that cannot remove a file that is still open. (merge 786b150 js/clone-dissociate later to maint).
Description of the "log.follow" configuration variable in "git log" documentation is now also copied to "git config" documentation. (merge fd8d07e dt/log-follow-config later to maint).
"git rebase -i" had a minor regression recently, which stopped considering a line that begins with an indented '#' in its insn sheet not a comment. Further, the code was still too picky on Windows where CRLF left by the editor is turned into a trailing CR on the line read via the "read" built-in command of bash. Both of these issues are now fixed. (merge 39743cf gr/rebase-i-drop-warn later to maint).
After "git checkout --detach", "git status" reported a fairly useless "HEAD detached at HEAD", instead of saying at which exact commit. (merge 0eb8548 mm/detach-at-HEAD-reflog later to maint).
When "git send-email" wanted to talk over Net::SMTP::SSL, Net::Cmd::datasend() did not like to be fed too many bytes at the same time and failed to send messages. Send the payload one line at a time to work around the problem. (merge f60c483 sa/send-email-smtp-batch-data-limit later to maint).
When "git am" was rewritten as a built-in, it stopped paying attention to user.signingkey, which was fixed. (merge 434c64d pt/am-builtin later to maint).
It was not possible to use a repository-lookalike created by "git worktree add" as a local source of "git clone". (merge d78db84 nd/clone-linked-checkout later to maint).
On a case insensitive filesystems, setting GIT_WORK_TREE variable using a random cases that does not agree with what the filesystem thinks confused Git that it wasn't inside the working tree. (merge 63ec5e1 js/icase-wt-detection later to maint).
Performance-measurement tests did not work without an installed Git. (merge 31cd128 sb/perf-without-installed-git later to maint).
A test script for the HTTP service had a timing dependent bug, which was fixed. (merge 362d8b6 sb/http-flaky-test-fix later to maint).
There were some classes of errors that "git fsck" diagnosed to its standard error that did not cause it to exit with non-zero status. (merge 122f76f jc/fsck-dropped-errors later to maint).
Work around "git p4" failing when the P4 depot records the contents in UTF-16 without UTF-16 BOM. (merge 1f5f390 ls/p4-translation-failure later to maint).
When "git gc --auto" is backgrounded, its diagnosis message is lost. Save it to a file in $GIT_DIR and show it next time the "gc --auto" is run. (merge 329e6e8 nd/gc-auto-background-fix later to maint).
The submodule code has been taught to work better with separate work trees created via "git worktree add". (merge 11f9dd7 mk/submodule-gitdir-path later to maint).
"git gc" is safe to run anytime only because it has the built-in grace period to protect young objects. In order to run with no grace period, the user must make sure that the repository is quiescent. (merge fae1a90 jc/doc-gc-prune-now later to maint).
A recent "filter-branch --msg-filter" broke skipping of the commit object header, which is fixed. (merge a5a4b3f jk/filter-branch-use-of-sed-on-incomplete-line later to maint).
The normalize_ceiling_entry() function does not muck with the end of the path it accepts, and the real world callers do rely on that, but a test insisted that the function drops a trailing slash. (merge b2a7123 rd/test-path-utils later to maint).
A test for interaction between untracked cache and sparse checkout added in Git 2.5 days were flaky. (merge 9b680fb dt/t7063-fix-flaky-test later to maint).
A couple of commands still showed "[options]" in their usage string to note where options should come on their command line, but we spell that "[]" in most places these days. (merge d96a031 rt/placeholder-in-usage later to maint).
The synopsis text and the usage string of subcommands that read list of things from the standard input are often shown as if they only take input from a file on a filesystem, which was misleading. (merge 33e8fc8 jc/usage-stdin later to maint).
"git am -3" had a small regression where it is aborted in its error handling codepath when underlying merge-recursive failed in certain ways, as it assumed that the internal call to merge-recursive will never die, which is not the case (yet). (merge c63d4b2 jc/am-3-fallback-regression-fix later to maint).
The linkage order of libraries was wrong in places around libcurl. (merge 7e91e8d rp/link-curl-before-ssl later to maint).
The name-hash subsystem that is used to cope with case insensitive filesystems keeps track of directories and their on-filesystem cases for all the paths in the index by holding a pointer to a randomly chosen cache entry that is inside the directory (for its ce->ce_name component). This pointer was not updated even when the cache entry was removed from the index, leading to use after free. This was fixed by recording the path for each directory instead of borrowing cache entries and restructuring the API somewhat. (merge 41284eb dt/name-hash-dir-entry-fix later to maint).
"git merge-file" tried to signal how many conflicts it found, which obviously would not work well when there are too many of them. (merge e34f802 jk/merge-file-exit-code later to maint).
The error message from "git blame --contents --reverse" incorrectly talked about "--contents --children". (merge 9526197 mk/blame-error-message later to maint).
"git imap-send" did not compile well with older version of cURL library. (merge 71d9257 js/imap-send-curl-compilation-fix later to maint).
Merging a branch that removes a path and another that changes the mode bits on the same path should have conflicted at the path, but it didn't and silently favoured the removal. (merge 72fac66 jk/delete-modechange-conflict later to maint).
"git --literal-pathspecs add -u/-A" without any command line argument misbehaved ever since Git 2.0. (merge 29abb33 jc/add-u-A-default-to-top later to maint).
"git daemon" uses "run_command()" without "finish_command()", so it needs to release resources itself, which it forgot to do. (merge b1b49ff rs/daemon-plug-child-leak later to maint).
"git status --branch --short" accessed beyond the constant string "HEAD", which has been corrected. (merge c72b49d rs/wt-status-detached-branch-fix later to maint).
We peek objects from submodule's object store by linking it to the list of alternate object databases, but the code to do so forgot to correctly initialize the list. (merge 9a6e4f0 jk/initialization-fix-to-add-submodule-odb later to maint).
The code to prepare the working tree side of temporary directory for the "dir-diff" feature forgot that symbolic links need not be copied (or symlinked) to the temporary area, as the code already special cases and overwrites them. Besides, it was wrong to try computing the object name of the target of symbolic link, which may not even exist or may be a directory. (merge cfe2d4b da/difftool later to maint).
A Range: request can be responded with a full response and when asked properly libcurl knows how to strip the result down to the requested range. However, we were hand-crafting a range request and it did not kick in.
Having a leftover .idx file without corresponding .pack file in the repository hurts performance; "git gc" learned to prune them. (merge 478f34d dk/gc-idx-wo-pack later to maint).
Apple's common crypto implementation of SHA1_Update() does not take more than 4GB at a time, and we now have a compile-time workaround for it. (merge 001fd7a ad/sha1-update-chunked later to maint).
Produce correct "dirty" marker for shell prompts, even when we are on an orphan or an unborn branch. (merge c26f70c sg/bash-prompt-dirty-orphan later to maint).
A build without NO_IPv6 used to use gethostbyname() when guessing user's hostname, instead of getaddrinfo() that is used in other codepaths in such a build. (merge 00bce77 ep/ident-with-getaddrinfo later to maint).
The exit code of git-fsck didnot reflect some types of errors found in packed objects, which has been corrected. (merge 8c24d83 dt/fsck-verify-pack-error later to maint).
Code clean-up, minor fixes etc.

New in Git 2.6.4 (Dec 8, 2015)

New in Git 2.6.3 (Nov 5, 2015)

The error message from "git blame --contents --reverse" incorrectly talked about "--contents --children".
"git merge-file" tried to signal how many conflicts it found, which obviously would not work well when there are too many of them.
The name-hash subsystem that is used to cope with case insensitive filesystems keeps track of directories and their on-filesystem cases for all the paths in the index by holding a pointer to a randomly chosen cache entry that is inside the directory (for its ce->ce_name component). This pointer was not updated even when the cache entry was removed from the index, leading to use after free. This was fixed by recording the path for each directory instead of borrowing cache entries and restructuring the API somewhat.
When the "git am" command was reimplemented in C, "git am -3" had a small regression where it is aborted in its error handling codepath when underlying merge-recursive failed in some ways.
The synopsis text and the usage string of subcommands that read list of things from the standard input are often shown as if they only take input from a file on a filesystem, which was misleading.
A couple of commands still showed "[options]" in their usage string to note where options should come on their command line, but we spell that "[]" in most places these days.
The submodule code has been taught to work better with separate work trees created via "git worktree add".
When "git gc --auto" is backgrounded, its diagnosis message is lost. It now is saved to a file in $GIT_DIR and is shown next time the "gc --auto" is run.
Work around "git p4" failing when the P4 depot records the contents in UTF-16 without UTF-16 BOM.
Recent update to "rebase -i" that tries to sanity check the edited insn sheet before it uses it has become too picky on Windows where CRLF left by the editor is turned into a trailing CR on the line read via the "read" built-in command.
"git clone --dissociate" runs a big "git repack" process at the end, and it helps to close file descriptors that are open on the packs and their idx files before doing so on filesystems that cannot remove a file that is still open.
Correct "git p4 --detect-labels" so that it does not fail to create a tag that points at a commit that is also being imported.
The internal stripspace() function has been moved to where it logically belongs to, i.e. strbuf API, and the command line parser of "git stripspace" has been updated to use the parse_options API.
Prepare for Git on-disk repository representation to undergo backward incompatible changes by introducing a new repository format version "1", with an extension mechanism.
"git gc" used to barf when a symbolic ref has gone dangling (e.g. the branch that used to be your upstream's default when you cloned from it is now gone, and you did "fetch --prune").
The normalize_ceiling_entry() function does not muck with the end of the path it accepts, and the real world callers do rely on that, but a test insisted that the function drops a trailing slash.
"git gc" is safe to run anytime only because it has the built-in grace period to protect young objects. In order to run with no grace period, the user must make sure that the repository is quiescent.
A recent "filter-branch --msg-filter" broke skipping of the commit object header, which is fixed.
"git --literal-pathspecs add -u/-A" without any command line argument misbehaved ever since Git 2.0.
Merging a branch that removes a path and another that changes the mode bits on the same path should have conflicted at the path, but it didn't and silently favoured the removal.
"git imap-send" did not compile well with older version of cURL library.
The linkage order of libraries was wrong in places around libcurl.
It was not possible to use a repository-lookalike created by "git worktree add" as a local source of "git clone".
When "git send-email" wanted to talk over Net::SMTP::SSL, Net::Cmd::datasend() did not like to be fed too many bytes at the same time and failed to send messages. Send the payload one line at a time to work around the problem.
We peek objects from submodule's object store by linking it to the list of alternate object databases, but the code to do so forgot to correctly initialize the list.
"git status --branch --short" accessed beyond the constant string "HEAD", which has been corrected.
"git daemon" uses "run_command()" without "finish_command()", so it needs to release resources itself, which it forgot to do.

New in Git 2.6.2 (Oct 17, 2015)

Fixes since v2.6.1:
There were some classes of errors that "git fsck" diagnosed to its standard error that did not cause it to exit with non-zero status.
A test script for the HTTP service had a timing dependent bug, which was fixed.
Performance-measurement tests did not work without an installed Git.
On a case insensitive filesystems, setting GIT_WORK_TREE variable using a random cases that does not agree with what the filesystem thinks confused Git that it wasn't inside the working tree.
When "git am" was rewritten as a built-in, it stopped paying attention to user.signingkey, which was fixed.
After "git checkout --detach", "git status" reported a fairly useless "HEAD detached at HEAD", instead of saying at which exact commit.
"git rebase -i" had a minor regression recently, which stopped considering a line that begins with an indented '#' in its insn sheet not a comment, which is now fixed.
Description of the "log.follow" configuration variable in "git log" documentation is now also copied to "git config" documentation.
Allocation related functions and stdio are unsafe things to call inside a signal handler, and indeed killing the pager can cause glibc to deadlock waiting on allocation mutex as our signal handler tries to free() some data structures in wait_for_pager(). Reduce these unsafe calls.
The way how --ref/--notes to specify the notes tree reference are DWIMmed was not clearly documented.
Customization to change the behaviour with "make -w" and "make -s" in our Makefile was broken when they were used together.
The Makefile always runs the library archiver with hardcoded "crs" options, which was inconvenient for exotic platforms on which people want to use programs with totally different set of command line options.
The ssh transport, just like any other transport over the network, did not clear GIT_* environment variables, but it is possible to use SendEnv and AcceptEnv to leak them to the remote invocation of Git, which is not a good idea at all. Explicitly clear them just like we do for the local transport.
"git blame --first-parent v1.0..v2.0" was not rejected but did not limit the blame to commits on the first parent chain.
Very small number of options take a parameter that is optional (which is not a great UI element as they can only appear at the end of the command line). Add notice to documentation of each and every one of them.
Also contains typofixes, documentation updates and trivial code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.6.1 (Oct 6, 2015)

New in Git 2.6.0 (Sep 29, 2015)

UI, Workflows & Features:
An asterisk as a substring (as opposed to the entirety) of a path component for both side of a refspec, e.g. "refs/heads/o*:refs/remotes/heads/i*", is now allowed.
New userdiff pattern definition for fountain screenwriting markup format has been added.
"git log" and friends learned a new "--date=format:..." option to format timestamps using system's strftime(3).
"git fast-import" learned to respond to the get-mark command via its cat-blob-fd interface.
"git rebase -i" learned "drop commit-object-name subject" command as another way to skip replaying of a commit.
A new configuration variable can enable "--follow" automatically when "git log" is run with one pathspec argument.
"git status" learned to show a more detailed information regarding the "rebase -i" session in progress.
"git cat-file" learned "--batch-all-objects" option to enumerate all available objects in the repository more quickly than "rev-list --all --objects" (the output includes unreachable objects, though).
"git fsck" learned to ignore errors on a set of known-to-be-bad objects, and also allows the warning levels of various kinds of non-critical breakages to be tweaked.
"git rebase -i"'s list of todo is made configurable.
"git send-email" now performs alias-expansion on names that are given via --cccmd, etc.
An environment variable GIT_REPLACE_REF_BASE tells Git to look into refs hierarchy other than refs/replace/ for the object replacement data.
Allow untracked cache (experimental) to be used when sparse checkout (experimental) is also in use.
"git pull --rebase" has been taught to pay attention to rebase.autostash configuration.
The command-line completion script (in contrib/) has been updated.
A negative !ref entry in multi-value transfer.hideRefs configuration can be used to say "don't hide this one".
After "git am" without "-3" stops, running "git am -3" pays attention to "-3" only for the patch that caused the original invocation to stop.
When linked worktree is used, simultaneous "notes merge" instances for the same ref in refs/notes/* are prevented from stomping on each other.
"git send-email" learned a new option --smtp-auth to limit the SMTP AUTH mechanisms to be used to a subset of what the system library supports.
A new configuration variable http.sslVersion can be used to specify what specific version of SSL/TLS to use to make a connection.
"git notes merge" can be told with "--strategy=" option how to automatically handle conflicts; this can now be configured by setting notes.mergeStrategy configuration variable.
"git log --cc" did not show any patch, even though most of the time the user meant "git log --cc -p -m" to see patch output for commits with a single parent, and combined diff for merge commits. The command is taught to DWIM "--cc" (without "--raw" and other forms of output specification) to "--cc -p -m".
"git config --list" output was hard to parse when values consist of multiple lines. "--name-only" option is added to help this.
A handful of usability & cosmetic fixes to gitk and l10n updates.
A completely empty e-mail address is now allowed in the authors file used by git-svn, to match the way it accepts the output from authors-prog.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
In preparation for allowing different "backends" to store the refs in a way different from the traditional "one ref per file in $GIT_DIR or in a $GIT_DIR/packed-refs file" filesystem storage, direct filesystem access to ref-like things like CHERRY_PICK_HEAD from scripts and programs has been reduced.
Computation of untracked status indicator by bash prompt script (in contrib/) has been optimized.
Memory use reduction when commit-slab facility is used to annotate sparsely (which is not recommended in the first place).
Clean up refs API and make "git clone" less intimate with the implementation detail.
"git pull" was reimplemented in C.
The packet tracing machinery allows to capture an incoming pack data to a file for debugging.
Move machinery to parse human-readable scaled numbers like 1k, 4M, and 2G as an option parameter's value from pack-objects to parse-options API, to make it available to other codepaths.
"git verify-tag" and "git verify-commit" have been taught to share more code, and then learned to optionally show the verification message from the underlying GPG implementation.
Various enhancements around "git am" reading patches generated by foreign SCM have been made.
Ref listing by "git branch -l" and "git tag -l" commands has started to be rebuilt, based on the for-each-ref machinery.
The code to perform multi-tree merges has been taught to repopulate the cache-tree upon a successful merge into the index, so that subsequent "diff-index --cached" (hence "status") and "write-tree" (hence "commit") will go faster.
The same logic in "git checkout" may now be removed, but that is a separate issue.
Tests that assume how reflogs are represented on the filesystem too much have been corrected.
"git am" has been rewritten in "C".
git_path() and mkpath() are handy helper functions but it is easy to misuse, as the callers need to be careful to keep the number of active results below 4. Their uses have been reduced.
The "lockfile" API has been rebuilt on top of a new "tempfile" API.
To prepare for allowing a different "ref" backend to be plugged in to the system, update_ref()/delete_ref() have been taught about ref-like things like MERGE_HEAD that are per-worktree (they will always be written to the filesystem inside $GIT_DIR).
The gitmodules API that is accessed from the C code learned to cache stuff lazily.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.5 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' notes for details).
"git subtree" (in contrib/) depended on "git log" output to be stable, which was a no-no. Apply a workaround to force a particular date format. (merge e7aac44 da/subtree-date-confusion later to maint).
An attempt to delete a ref by pushing into a repository whose HEAD symbolic reference points at an unborn branch that cannot be created due to ref D/F conflict (e.g. refs/heads/a/b exists, HEAD points at refs/heads/a) failed. (merge b112b14 jx/do-not-crash-receive-pack-wo-head later to maint).
The low-level "git send-pack" did not honor 'user.signingkey' configuration variable when sending a signed-push. (merge d830d39 db/send-pack-user-signingkey later to maint).
"sparse checkout" misbehaved for a path that is excluded from the checkout when switching between branches that differ at the path. (merge 7d78241 as/sparse-checkout-removal later to maint).
An experimental "untracked cache" feature used uname(2) in a slightly unportable way. (merge 100e433 cb/uname-in-untracked later to maint).
A "rebase" replays changes of the local branch on top of something else, as such they are placed in stage #3 and referred to as "theirs", while the changes in the new base, typically a foreign work, are placed in stage #2 and referred to as "ours". Clarify the "checkout --ours/--theirs". (merge f303016 se/doc-checkout-ours-theirs later to maint).
The "rev-parse --parseopt" mode parsed the option specification and the argument hint in a strange way to allow '=' and other special characters in the option name while forbidding them from the argument hint. This made it impossible to define an option like "--pair =" with "pair=key=value" specification, which instead would have defined a "--pair=key " option. (merge 2d893df ib/scripted-parse-opt-better-hint-string later to maint).
Often a fast-import stream builds a new commit on top of the previous commit it built, and it often unconditionally emits a "from" command to specify the first parent, which can be omitted in such a case. This caused fast-import to forget the tree of the previous commit and then re-read it from scratch, which was inefficient. Optimize for this common case. (merge 0df3245 mh/fast-import-optimize-current-from later to maint).
Running an aliased command from a subdirectory when the .git thing in the working tree is a gitfile pointing elsewhere did not work. (merge d95138e nd/export-worktree later to maint).
"Is this subdirectory a separate repository that should not be touched?" check "git clean" was inefficient. This was replaced with a more optimized check. (merge fbf2fec ee/clean-remove-dirs later to maint).
The "new-worktree-mode" hack in "checkout" that was added in nd/multiple-work-trees topic has been removed by updating the implementation of new "worktree add". (merge 65f9b75 es/worktree-add-cleanup later to maint).
Remove remaining cruft from "git checkout --to", which transitioned to "git worktree add". (merge 114ff88 es/worktree-add later to maint).
An off-by-one error made "git remote" to mishandle a remote with a single letter nickname. (merge bc598c3 mh/get-remote-group-fix later to maint).
"git clone $URL", when cloning from a site whose sole purpose is to host a single repository (hence, no path after :///), tried to use the site name as the new repository name, but did not remove username or password when part was of the form @:. The code is taught to redact these. (merge adef956 ps/guess-repo-name-at-root later to maint).
Running tests with the "-x" option to make them verbose had some unpleasant interactions with other features of the test suite. (merge 9b5fe78 jk/test-with-x later to maint).
t1509 test that requires a dedicated VM environment had some bitrot, which has been corrected. (merge faacc5a ps/t1509-chroot-test-fixup later to maint).
"git pull" in recent releases of Git has a regression in the code that allows custom path to the --upload-pack=. This has been corrected.
Note that this is irrelevant for 'master' with "git pull" rewritten in C. (merge 13e0e28 mm/pull-upload-pack later to maint).
When trying to see that an object does not exist, a state errno leaked from our "first try to open a packfile with O_NOATIME and then if it fails retry without it" logic on a system that refuses O_NOATIME. This confused us and caused us to die, saying that the packfile is unreadable, when we should have just reported that the object does not exist in that packfile to the caller. (merge dff6f28 cb/open-noatime-clear-errno later to maint).
The codepath to produce error messages had a hard-coded limit to the size of the message, primarily to avoid memory allocation while calling die(). (merge f4c3edc jk/long-error-messages later to maint).
strbuf_read() used to have one extra iteration (and an unnecessary strbuf_grow() of 8kB), which was eliminated. (merge 3ebbd00 jh/strbuf-read-use-read-in-full later to maint).
We rewrote one of the build scripts in Perl but this reimplements in Bourne shell. (merge 57cee8a sg/help-group later to maint).
The experimental untracked-cache feature were buggy when paths with a few levels of subdirectories are involved. (merge 73f9145 dt/untracked-subdir later to maint).
"interpret-trailers" helper mistook a single-liner log message that has a colon as the end of existing trailer.
The "interpret-trailers" helper mistook a multi-paragraph title of a commit log message with a colon in it as the end of the trailer block. (merge 5c99995 cc/trailers-corner-case-fix later to maint).
"git describe" without argument defaulted to describe the HEAD commit, but "git describe --contains" didn't. Arguably, in a repository used for active development, such defaulting would not be very useful as the tip of branch is typically not tagged, but it is better to be consistent. (merge 2bd0706 sg/describe-contains later to maint).
The client side codepaths in "git push" have been cleaned up and the user can request to perform an optional "signed push", i.e. sign only when the other end accepts signed push. (merge 68c757f db/push-sign-if-asked later to maint).
Because the configuration system does not allow "alias.0foo" and "pager.0foo" as the configuration key, the user cannot use '0foo' as a custom command name anyway, but "git 0foo" tried to look these keys up and emitted useless warnings before saying '0foo is not a git command'. These warning messages have been squelched. (merge 9e9de18 jk/fix-alias-pager-config-key-warnings later to maint).
"git rev-list" does not take "--notes" option, but did not complain when one is given. (merge 2aea7a5 jk/rev-list-has-no-notes later to maint).
When re-priming the cache-tree opportunistically while committing the in-core index as-is, we mistakenly invalidated the in-core index too aggressively, causing the experimental split-index code to unnecessarily rewrite the on-disk index file(s). (merge 475a344 dt/commit-preserve-base-index-upon-opportunistic-cache-tree-update later to maint).
"git archive" did not use zip64 extension when creating an archive with more than 64k entries, which nobody should need, right ;-)? (merge 88329ca rs/archive-zip-many later to maint).
The code in "multiple-worktree" support that attempted to recover from an inconsistent state updated an incorrect file. (merge 82fde87 nd/fixup-linked-gitdir later to maint).
On case insensitive systems, "git p4" did not work well with client specs.
"git init empty && git -C empty log" said "bad default revision 'HEAD'", which was found to be a bit confusing to new users. (merge ce11360 jk/log-missing-default-HEAD later to maint).
Recent versions of scripted "git am" has a performance regression in "git am --skip" codepath, which no longer exists in the built-in version on the 'master' front. Fix the regression in the last scripted version that appear in 2.5.x maintenance track and older. (merge b9d6689 js/maint-am-skip-performance-regression later to maint).
The branch descriptions that are set with "git branch --edit-description" option were used in many places but they weren't clearly documented. (merge 561d2b7 po/doc-branch-desc later to maint).
Code cleanups and documentation updates.
(merge 1c601af es/doc-clean-outdated-tools later to maint).
(merge 3581304 kn/tag-doc-fix later to maint).
(merge 3a59e59 kb/i18n-doc later to maint).
(merge 45abdee sb/remove-unused-var-from-builtin-add later to maint).
(merge 14691e3 sb/parse-options-codeformat later to maint).
(merge 4a6ada3 ad/bisect-cleanup later to maint).
(merge da4c5ad ta/docfix-index-format-tech later to maint).
(merge ae25fd3 sb/check-return-from-read-ref later to maint).
(merge b3325df nd/dwim-wildcards-as-pathspecs later to maint).
(merge 7aa9b9b sg/wt-status-header-inclusion later to maint).
(merge f04c690 as/docfix-reflog-expire-unreachable later to maint).
(merge 1269847 sg/t3020-typofix later to maint).
(merge 8b54c23 jc/calloc-pathspec later to maint).
(merge a6926b8 po/po-readme later to maint).
(merge 54d160e ss/fix-config-fd-leak later to maint).
(merge b80fa84 ah/submodule-typofix-in-error later to maint).
(merge 99885bc ah/reflog-typofix-in-error later to maint).
(merge 9476c2c ah/read-tree-usage-string later to maint).
(merge b8c1d27 ah/pack-objects-usage-strings later to maint).
(merge 486e1e1 br/svn-doc-include-paths-config later to maint).
(merge 1733ed3 ee/clean-test-fixes later to maint).
(merge 5fcadc3 gb/apply-comment-typofix later to maint).
(merge b894d3e mp/t7060-diff-index-test later to maint).
(merge d238710 as/config-doc-markup-fix later to maint).

New in Git 2.5.3 (Sep 18, 2015)

New in Git 2.5.2 (Sep 10, 2015)

Fixes:
"git init empty && git -C empty log" said "bad default revision 'HEAD'", which was found to be a bit confusing to new users.
The "interpret-trailers" helper mistook a multi-paragraph title of a commit log message with a colon in it as the end of the trailer block.
When re-priming the cache-tree opportunistically while committing the in-core index as-is, we mistakenly invalidated the in-core index too aggressively, causing the experimental split-index code to unnecessarily rewrite the on-disk index file(s).
"git archive" did not use zip64 extension when creating an archive with more than 64k entries, which nobody should need, right ;-)?
The code in "multiple-worktree" support that attempted to recover from an inconsistent state updated an incorrect file.
"git rev-list" does not take "--notes" option, but did not complain when one is given.
Because the configuration system does not allow "alias.0foo" and "pager.0foo" as the configuration key, the user cannot use '0foo' as a custom command name anyway, but "git 0foo" tried to look these keys up and emitted useless warnings before saying '0foo is not a git command'. These warning messages have been squelched.
We recently rewrote one of the build scripts in Perl, which made it necessary to have Perl to build Git. Reduced Perl dependency by rewriting it again using sed.
t1509 test that requires a dedicated VM environment had some bitrot, which has been corrected.
strbuf_read() used to have one extra iteration (and an unnecessary strbuf_grow() of 8kB), which was eliminated.
The codepath to produce error messages had a hard-coded limit to the size of the message, primarily to avoid memory allocation while calling die().
When trying to see that an object does not exist, a state errno leaked from our "first try to open a packfile with O_NOATIME and then if it fails retry without it" logic on a system that refuses O_NOATIME. This confused us and caused us to die, saying that the packfile is unreadable, when we should have just reported that the object does not exist in that packfile to the caller.
An off-by-one error made "git remote" to mishandle a remote with a single letter nickname.
A handful of codepaths that used to use fixed-sized arrays to hold pathnames have been corrected to use strbuf and other mechanisms to allow longer pathnames without fearing overflows.
Also contains typofixes, documentation updates and trivial code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.6.0 RC 0 (Sep 3, 2015)

UPDATES SINCE V2.5:
UI, Workflows & Features:
An asterisk as a substring (as opposed to the entirety) of a path component for both side of a refspec, e.g. "refs/heads/o*:refs/remotes/heads/i*", is now allowed.
New userdiff pattern definition for fountain screenwriting markup format has been added.
"git log" and friends learned a new "--date=format:..." option to format timestamps using system's strftime(3).
"git fast-import" learned to respond to the get-mark command via its cat-blob-fd interface.
"git rebase -i" learned "drop commit-object-name subject" command as another way to skip replaying of a commit.
A new configuration variable can enable "--follow" automatically when "git log" is run with one pathspec argument.
"git status" learned to show a more detailed information regarding the "rebase -i" session in progress.
"git cat-file" learned "--batch-all-objects" option to enumerate all available objects in the repository more quickly than "rev-list --all --objects" (the output includes unreachable objects, though).
"git fsck" learned to ignore errors on a set of known-to-be-bad objects, and also allows the warning levels of various kinds of non-critical breakages to be tweaked.
"git rebase -i"'s list of todo is made configurable.
"git send-email" now performs alias-expansion on names that are given via --cccmd, etc.
An environment variable GIT_REPLACE_REF_BASE tells Git to look into refs hierarchy other than refs/replace/ for the object replacement data.
Allow untracked cache (experimental) to be used when sparse checkout (experimental) is also in use.
"git pull --rebase" has been taught to pay attention to rebase.autostash configuration.
The command-line completion script (in contrib/) has been updated.
A negative !ref entry in multi-value transfer.hideRefs configuration can be used to say "don't hide this one".
After "git am" without "-3" stops, running "git am -" pays attention to "-3" only for the patch that caused the original invocation to stop.
When linked worktree is used, simultaneous "notes merge" instances for the same ref in refs/notes/* are prevented from stomping on each other.
"git send-email" learned a new option --smtp-auth to limit the SMTP AUTH mechanisms to be used to a subset of what the system library supports.
A new configuration variable http.sslVersion can be used to specify what specific version of SSL/TLS to use to make a connection.
"git notes merge" can be told with "--strategy=" option how to automatically handle conflicts; this can now be configured by setting notes.mergeStrategy configuration variable.
"git log --cc" did not show any patch, even though most of the time the user meant "git log --cc -p -m" to see patch output for commits with a single parent, and combined diff for merge commits. The command is taught to DWIM "--cc" (without "--raw" and other forms of output specification) to "--cc -p -m".
"git config --list" output was hard to parse when values consist of multiple lines. "--name-only" option is added to help this.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.:
In preparation for allowing different "backends" to store the refs in a way different from the traditional "one ref per file in $GIT_DIR or in a $GIT_DIR/packed-refs file" filesystem storage, direct filesystem access to ref-like things like CHERRY_PICK_HEAD from scripts and programs has been reduced.
Computation of untracked status indicator by bash prompt script (in contrib/) has been optimized.
Memory use reduction when commit-slab facility is used to annotate sparsely (which is not recommended in the first place).
Clean up refs API and make "git clone" less intimate with the implementation detail.
"git pull" was reimplemented in C.
The packet tracing machinery allows to capture an incoming pack data to a file for debugging.
Move machinery to parse human-readable scaled numbers like 1k, 4M, and 2G as an option parameter's value from pack-objects to parse-options API, to make it available to other codepaths.
"git verify-tag" and "git verify-commit" have been taught to share more code, and then learned to optionally show the verification message from the underlying GPG implementation.
Various enhancements around "git am" reading patches generated by foreign SCM have been made.
Ref listing by "git branch -l" and "git tag -l" commands has started to be rebuilt, based on the for-each-ref machinery.
The code to perform multi-tree merges has been taught to repopulate the cache-tree upon a successful merge into the index, so that subsequent "diff-index --cached" (hence "status") and "write-tree" (hence "commit") will go faster.
The same logic in "git checkout" may now be removed, but that is a separate issue.
Tests that assume how reflogs are represented on the filesystem too much have been corrected.
"git am" has been rewritten in "C".
git_path() and mkpath() are handy helper functions but it is easy to misuse, as the callers need to be careful to keep the number of active results below 4. Their uses have been reduced.
The "lockfile" API has been rebuilt on top of a new "tempfile" API.
To prepare for allowing a different "ref" backend to be plugged in to the system, update_ref()/delete_ref() have been taught about ref-like things like MERGE_HEAD that are per-worktree (they will always be written to the filesystem inside $GIT_DIR).
The gitmodules API that is accessed from the C code learned to cache stuff lazily.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.5:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.5 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).
"git subtree" (in contrib/) depended on "git log" output to be stable, which was a no-no. Apply a workaround to force a particular date format. (merge e7aac44 da/subtree-date-confusion later to maint).
An attempt to delete a ref by pushing into a repository whose HEAD symbolic reference points at an unborn branch that cannot be created due to ref D/F conflict (e.g. refs/heads/a/b exists, HEAD points at refs/heads/a) failed. (merge b112b14 jx/do-not-crash-receive-pack-wo-head later to maint).
The low-level "git send-pack" did not honor 'user.signingkey' configuration variable when sending a signed-push. (merge d830d39 db/send-pack-user-signingkey later to maint).
"sparse checkout" misbehaved for a path that is excluded from the checkout when switching between branches that differ at the path. (merge 7d78241 as/sparse-checkout-removal later to maint).
An experimental "untracked cache" feature used uname(2) in a slightly unportable way. (merge 100e433 cb/uname-in-untracked later to maint).
A "rebase" replays changes of the local branch on top of something else, as such they are placed in stage #3 and referred to as "theirs", while the changes in the new base, typically a foreign work, are placed in stage #2 and referred to as "ours". Clarify the "checkout --ours/--theirs". (merge f303016 se/doc-checkout-ours-theirs later to maint).
The "rev-parse --parseopt" mode parsed the option specification and the argument hint in a strange way to allow '=' and other special characters in the option name while forbidding them from the argument hint. This made it impossible to define an option like "--pair =" with "pair=key=value" specification, which instead would have defined a "--pair=key " option. (merge 2d893df ib/scripted-parse-opt-better-hint-string later to maint).
Often a fast-import stream builds a new commit on top of the previous commit it built, and it often unconditionally emits a "from" command to specify the first parent, which can be omitted in such a case. This caused fast-import to forget the tree of the previous commit and then re-read it from scratch, which was inefficient. Optimize for this common case. (merge 0df3245 mh/fast-import-optimize-current-from later to maint).
Running an aliased command from a subdirectory when the .git thing in the working tree is a gitfile pointing elsewhere did not work. (merge d95138e nd/export-worktree later to maint).
"Is this subdirectory a separate repository that should not be touched?" check "git clean" was inefficient. This was replaced with a more optimized check. (merge fbf2fec ee/clean-remove-dirs later to maint).
The "new-worktree-mode" hack in "checkout" that was added in nd/multiple-work-trees topic has been removed by updating the implementation of new "worktree add". (merge 65f9b75 es/worktree-add-cleanup later to maint).
Remove remaining cruft from "git checkout --to", which transitioned to "git worktree add". (merge 114ff88 es/worktree-add later to maint).
An off-by-one error made "git remote" to mishandle a remote with a single letter nickname. (merge bc598c3 mh/get-remote-group-fix later to maint).
"git clone $URL", when cloning from a site whose sole purpose is to host a single repository (hence, no path after :///), tried to use the site name as the new repository name, but did not remove username or password when part was of the form @:. The code is taught to redact these. (merge adef956 ps/guess-repo-name-at-root later to maint).
Running tests with the "-x" option to make them verbose had some unpleasant interactions with other features of the test suite. (merge 9b5fe78 jk/test-with-x later to maint).
t1509 test that requires a dedicated VM environment had some bitrot, which has been corrected. (merge faacc5a ps/t1509-chroot-test-fixup later to maint).
"git pull" in recent releases of Git has a regression in the code that allows custom path to the --upload-pack=. This has been corrected.
Note that this is irrelevant for 'master' with "git pull" rewritten in C. (merge 13e0e28 mm/pull-upload-pack later to maint).
When trying to see that an object does not exist, a state errno leaked from our "first try to open a packfile with O_NOATIME and then if it fails retry without it" logic on a system that refuses O_NOATIME. This confused us and caused us to die, saying that the packfile is unreadable, when we should have just reported that the object does not exist in that packfile to the caller. (merge dff6f28 cb/open-noatime-clear-errno later to maint).
The codepath to produce error messages had a hard-coded limit to the size of the message, primarily to avoid memory allocation while calling die(). (merge f4c3edc jk/long-error-messages later to maint).
strbuf_read() used to have one extra iteration (and an unnecessary strbuf_grow() of 8kB), which was eliminated. (merge 3ebbd00 jh/strbuf-read-use-read-in-full later to maint).
We rewrote one of the build scripts in Perl but this reimplements in Bourne shell. (merge 82aec45 sg/help-group later to maint).
The experimental untracked-cache feature were buggy when paths with a few levels of subdirectories are involved. (merge 73f9145 dt/untracked-subdir later to maint).
"interpret-trailers" helper mistook a single-liner log message that has a colon as the end of existing trailer.
The "interpret-trailers" helper mistook a multi-paragraph title of a commit log message with a colon in it as the end of the trailer block. (merge 5c99995 cc/trailers-corner-case-fix later to maint).
"git describe" without argument defaulted to describe the HEAD commit, but "git describe --contains" didn't. Arguably, in a repository used for active development, such defaulting would not be very useful as the tip of branch is typically not tagged, but it is better to be consistent. (merge 2bd0706 sg/describe-contains later to maint).
The client side codepaths in "git push" have been cleaned up and the user can request to perform an optional "signed push", i.e. sign only when the other end accepts signed push. (merge 68c757f db/push-sign-if-asked later to maint).
Because the configuration system does not allow "alias.0foo" and "pager.0foo" as the configuration key, the user cannot use '0foo' as a custom command name anyway, but "git 0foo" tried to look these keys up and emitted useless warnings before saying '0foo is not a git command'. These warning messages have been squelched. (merge 9e9de18 jk/fix-alias-pager-config-key-warnings later to maint).
"git rev-list" does not take "--notes" option, but did not complain when one is given. (merge 2aea7a5 jk/rev-list-has-no-notes later to maint).
When re-priming the cache-tree opportunistically while committing the in-core index as-is, we mistakenly invalidated the in-core index too aggressively, causing the experimental split-index code to unnecessarily rewrite the on-disk index file(s). (merge 475a344 dt/commit-preserve-base-index-upon-opportunistic-cache-tree-update later to maint).
"git archive" did not use zip64 extension when creating an archive with more than 64k entries, which nobody should need, right ;-)? (merge 88329ca rs/archive-zip-many later to maint).
The code in "multiple-worktree" support that attempted to recover from an inconsistent state updated an incorrect file. (merge 82fde87 nd/fixup-linked-gitdir later to maint).
On case insensitive systems, "git p4" did not work well with client specs.
"git init empty && git -C empty log" said "bad default revision 'HEAD'", which was found to be a bit confusing to new users. (merge ce11360 jk/log-missing-default-HEAD later to maint).
Code cleanups and documentation updates.

New in Git 2.5.1 (Aug 28, 2015)

Fixes since v2.5:
Running an aliased command from a subdirectory when the .git thing in the working tree is a gitfile pointing elsewhere did not work.
Often a fast-import stream builds a new commit on top of the previous commit it built, and it often unconditionally emits a "from" command to specify the first parent, which can be omitted in such a case. This caused fast-import to forget the tree of the previous commit and then re-read it from scratch, which was inefficient. Optimize for this common case.
The "rev-parse --parseopt" mode parsed the option specification and the argument hint in a strange way to allow '=' and other special characters in the option name while forbidding them from the argument hint. This made it impossible to define an option like "--pair =" with "pair=key=value" specification, which instead would have defined a "--pair=key " option.
A "rebase" replays changes of the local branch on top of something else, as such they are placed in stage #3 and referred to as "theirs", while the changes in the new base, typically a foreign work, are placed in stage #2 and referred to as "ours". Clarify the "checkout --ours/--theirs".
An experimental "untracked cache" feature used uname(2) in a slightly unportable way.
"sparse checkout" misbehaved for a path that is excluded from the checkout when switching between branches that differ at the path.
The low-level "git send-pack" did not honor 'user.signingkey' configuration variable when sending a signed-push.
An attempt to delete a ref by pushing into a repository whose HEAD symbolic reference points at an unborn branch that cannot be created due to ref D/F conflict (e.g. refs/heads/a/b exists, HEAD points at refs/heads/a) failed.
"git subtree" (in contrib/) depended on "git log" output to be stable, which was a no-no. Apply a workaround to force a particular date format.
"git clone $URL" in recent releases of Git contains a regression in the code that invents a new repository name incorrectly based on the $URL. This has been corrected. (merge db2e220 jk/guess-repo-name-regression-fix later to maint).
Running tests with the "-x" option to make them verbose had some unpleasant interactions with other features of the test suite. (merge 9b5fe78 jk/test-with-x later to maint).
"git pull" in recent releases of Git has a regression in the code that allows custom path to the --upload-pack=. This has been corrected.
pipe() emulation used in Git for Windows looked at a wrong variable when checking for an error from an _open_osfhandle() call.
Also contains typofixes, documentation updates and trivial code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.4.6 (Jul 16, 2015)

New in Git 2.5.0 RC (Jun 26, 2015)

UPDATES SINCE V2.4:
UI, Workflows & Features:
The bash completion script (in contrib/) learned a few options that "git revert" takes.
Whitespace breakages in deleted and context lines can also be painted in the output of "git diff" and friends with the new --ws-error-highlight option.
List of commands shown by "git help" are grouped along the workflow elements to help early learners.
"git p4" now detects the filetype (e.g. binary) correctly even when the files are opened exclusively.
git p4 attempts to better handle branches in Perforce.
"git p4" learned "--changes-block-size " to read the changes in chunks from Perforce, instead of making one call to "p4 changes" that may trigger "too many rows scanned" error from Perforce.
More workaround for Perforce's row number limit in "git p4".
Unlike "$EDITOR" and "$GIT_EDITOR" that can hold the path to the command and initial options (e.g. "/path/to/emacs -nw"), 'git p4' did not let the shell interpolate the contents of the environment variable that name the editor "$P4EDITOR" (and "$EDITOR", too). This release makes it in line with the rest of Git, as well as with Perforce.
A new short-hand @{push} denotes the remote-tracking branch that tracks the branch at the remote the would be pushed to.
"git show-branch --topics HEAD" (with no other arguments) did not do anything interesting. Instead, contrast the given revision against all the local branches by default.
A replacement for contrib/workdir/git-new-workdir that does not rely on symbolic links and make sharing of objects and refs safer by making the borrowee and borrowers aware of each other.
Consider this as still an experimental feature; the UI will likely to change.
Tweak the sample "store" backend of the credential helper to honor XDG configuration file locations when specified.
A heuristic we use to catch mistyped paths on the command line "git " is to make sure that all the non-rev parameters in the later part of the command line are names of the files in the working tree, but that means "git grep $str -- \*.c" must always be disambiguated with "--", because nobody sane will create a file whose name literally is asterisk-dot-see. Loosen the heuristic to declare that with a wildcard string the user likely meant to give us a pathspec.
"git merge FETCH_HEAD" learned that the previous "git fetch" could be to create an Octopus merge, i.e. recording multiple branches that are not marked as "not-for-merge"; this allows us to lose an old style invocation "git merge HEAD $commits..." in the implementation of "git pull" script; the old style syntax can now be deprecated (but not removed yet).
Filter scripts were run with SIGPIPE disabled on the Git side, expecting that they may not read what Git feeds them to filter. We however treated a filter that does not read its input fully before exiting as an error. We no longer do and ignore EPIPE when writing to feed the filter scripts.
This changes semantics, but arguably in a good way. If a filter can produce its output without fully consuming its input using whatever magic, we now let it do so, instead of diagnosing it as a programming error.
Instead of dying immediately upon failing to obtain a lock, the locking (of refs etc) retries after a short while with backoff.
Introduce http..SSLCipherList configuration variable to tweak the list of cipher suite to be used with libcURL when talking with https:// sites.
"git subtree" script (in contrib/) used "echo -n" to produce progress messages in a non-portable way.
"git subtree" script (in contrib/) does not have --squash option when pushing, but the documentation and help text pretended as if it did.
The Git subcommand completion (in contrib/) no longer lists credential helpers among candidates; they are not something the end user would invoke interactively.
The index file can be taught with "update-index --untracked-cache" to optionally remember already seen untracked files, in order to speed up "git status" in a working tree with tons of cruft.
"git mergetool" learned to drive WinMerge as a backend.
"git upload-pack" that serves "git fetch" can be told to serve commits that are not at the tip of any ref, as long as they are reachable from a ref, with uploadpack.allowReachableSHA1InWant configuration variable.
"git cat-file --batch(-check)" learned the "--follow-symlinks" option that follows an in-tree symbolic link when asked about an object via extended SHA-1 syntax, e.g. HEAD:RelNotes that points at Documentation/RelNotes/2.5.0.txt. With the new option, the command behaves as if HEAD:Documentation/RelNotes/2.5.0.txt was given as input instead.
"git send-email" learned the alias file format used by the sendmail program (in a simplified form; we obviously do not feed pipes).
"git am" learned am.threeWay configuration variable.
Traditionally, external low-level 3-way merge drivers are expected to produce their results based solely on the contents of the three variants given in temporary files named by %O, %A and %B on their command line. Additionally allow them to look at the final path (given by %P).
"git blame" learned blame.showEmail configuration variable.
"git apply" cannot diagnose a patch corruption when the breakage is to mark the length of the hunk shorter than it really is on the hunk header line "@@ -l,k +m,n @@"; one special case it could is when the hunk becomes no-op (e.g. k == n == 2 for two-line context patch output), and it learned to do so in this special case.
Add the "--allow-unknown-type" option to "cat-file" to allow inspecting loose objects of an experimental or a broken type.
Many long-running operations show progress eye-candy, even when they are later backgrounded. Hide the eye-candy when the process is sent to the background instead. (merge a4fb76c lm/squelch-bg-progress later to maint).
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
"unsigned char [20]" used throughout the code to represent object names are being converted into a semi-opaque "struct object_id". This effort is expected to interfere with other topics in flight, but hopefully will give us one extra level of abstraction in the end, when completed.
for_each_ref() callback functions were taught to name the objects not with "unsigned char sha1[20]" but with "struct object_id".
Catch a programmer mistake to feed a pointer not an array to ARRAY_SIZE() macro, by using a couple of GCC extensions.
Some error messages in "git config" were emitted without calling the usual error() facility.
When "add--interactive" splits a hunk into two overlapping hunks and then let the user choose only one, it sometimes feeds an incorrect patch text to "git apply". Add tests to demonstrate this.
I have a slight suspicion that this may be $gmane/87202 coming back and biting us (I seem to have said "let's run with this and see what happens" back then).
More line-ending tests.
An earlier rewrite to use strbuf_getwholeline() instead of fgets(3) to read packed-refs file revealed that the former is unacceptably inefficient. It has been optimized by using getdelim(3) when available.
The refs API uses ref_lock struct which had its own "int fd", even though the same file descriptor was in the lock struct it contains. Clean-up the code to lose this redundant field.
There was a dead code that used to handle "git pull --tags" and show special-cased error message, which was made irrelevant when the semantics of the option changed back in Git 1.9 days. (merge 19d122b pt/pull-tags-error-diag later to maint).
Help us to find broken test script that splits the body part of the test by mistaken use of wrong kind of quotes. (merge d93d5d5 jc/test-prereq-validate later to maint).
Developer support to automatically detect broken &&-chain in the test scripts is now turned on by default. (merge 92b269f jk/test-chain-lint later to maint).
Error reporting mechanism used in "refs" API has been made more consistent.
"git pull" has more test coverage now.
"git pull" has become more aware of the options meant for underlying "git fetch" and then learned to use parse-options parser.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.4:
Git 2.4 broke setting verbosity and progress levels on "git clone" with native transports. (merge 822f0c4 mh/clone-verbosity-fix later to maint).
"git add -e" did not allow the user to abort the operation by killing the editor. (merge cb64800 jk/add-e-kill-editor later to maint).
Memory usage of "git index-pack" has been trimmed by tens of per-cent. (merge f0e7f11 nd/slim-index-pack-memory-usage later to maint).
"git rev-list --objects $old --not --all" to see if everything that is reachable from $old is already connected to the existing refs was very inefficient. (merge b6e8a3b jk/still-interesting later to maint).
"hash-object --literally" introduced in v2.2 was not prepared to take a really long object type name. (merge 1427a7f jc/hash-object later to maint).
"git rebase --quiet" was not quite quiet when there is nothing to do. (merge 22946a9 jk/rebase-quiet-noop later to maint).
The completion for "log --decorate=" parameter value was incorrect. (merge af16bda sg/complete-decorate-full-not-long later to maint).
"filter-branch" corrupted commit log message that ends with an incomplete line on platforms with some "sed" implementations that munge such a line. Work it around by avoiding to use "sed". (merge df06201 jk/filter-branch-use-of-sed-on-incomplete-line later to maint).
"git daemon" fails to build from the source under NO_IPV6 configuration (regression in 2.4). (merge d358f77 jc/daemon-no-ipv6-for-2.4.1 later to maint).
Some time ago, "git blame" (incorrectly) lost the convert_to_git() call when synthesizing a fake "tip" commit that represents the state in the working tree, which broke folks who record the history with LF line ending to make their project portable across platforms while terminating lines in their working tree files with CRLF for their platform. (merge 4bf256d tb/blame-resurrect-convert-to-git later to maint).
We avoid setting core.worktree when the repository location is the ".git" directory directly at the top level of the working tree, but the code misdetected the case in which the working tree is at the root level of the filesystem (which arguably is a silly thing to do, but still valid). (merge 84ccad8 jk/init-core-worktree-at-root later to maint).
"git commit --date=now" or anything that relies on approxidate lost the daylight-saving-time offset. (merge f6e6362 jc/epochtime-wo-tz later to maint).
Access to objects in repositories that borrow from another one on a slow NFS server unnecessarily got more expensive due to recent code becoming more cautious in a naive way not to lose objects to pruning. (merge ee1c6c3 jk/prune-mtime later to maint).
The codepaths that read .gitignore and .gitattributes files have been taught that these files encoded in UTF-8 may have UTF-8 BOM marker at the beginning; this makes it in line with what we do for configuration files already. (merge 27547e5 cn/bom-in-gitignore later to maint).
a few helper scripts in the test suite did not report errors correctly. (merge de248e9 ep/fix-test-lib-functions-report later to maint).
The default $HOME/.gitconfig file created upon "git config --global" that edits it had incorrectly spelled user.name and user.email entries in it. (merge 7e11052 oh/fix-config-default-user-name-section later to maint).
"git cat-file bl $blob" failed to barf even though there is no object type that is "bl". (merge b7994af jk/type-from-string-gently later to maint).
The usual "git diff" when seeing a file turning into a directory showed a patchset to remove the file and create all files in the directory, but "git diff --no-index" simply refused to work. Also, when asked to compare a file and a directory, imitate POSIX "diff" and compare the file with the file with the same name in the directory, instead of refusing to run. (merge 0615173 jc/diff-no-index-d-f later to maint).
"git rebase -i" moved the "current" command from "todo" to "done" a bit too prematurely, losing a step when a "pick" did not even start. (merge 8cbc57c ph/rebase-i-redo later to maint).
The connection initiation code for "ssh" transport tried to absorb differences between the stock "ssh" and Putty-supplied "plink" and its derivatives, but the logic to tell that we are using "plink" variants were too loose and falsely triggered when "plink" appeared anywhere in the path (e.g. "/home/me/bin/uplink/ssh"). (merge baaf233 bc/connect-plink later to maint).
We have prepended $GIT_EXEC_PATH and the path "git" is installed in (typically "/usr/bin") to $PATH when invoking subprograms and hooks for almost eternity, but the original use case the latter tried to support was semi-bogus (i.e. install git to /opt/foo/git and run it without having /opt/foo on $PATH), and more importantly it has become less and less relevant as Git grew more mainstream (i.e. the users would _want_ to have it on their $PATH). Stop prepending the path in which "git" is installed to users' $PATH, as that would interfere the command search order people depend on (e.g. they may not like versions of programs that are unrelated to Git in /usr/bin and want to override them by having different ones in /usr/local/bin and have the latter directory earlier in their $PATH). (merge a0b4507 jk/git-no-more-argv0-path-munging later to maint).
core.excludesfile (defaulting to $XDG_HOME/git/ignore) is supposed to be overridden by repository-specific .git/info/exclude file, but the order was swapped from the beginning. This belatedly fixes it. (merge 099d2d8 jc/gitignore-precedence later to maint).
There was a commented-out (instead of being marked to expect failure) test that documented a breakage that was fixed since the test was written; turn it into a proper test. (merge 66d2e04 sb/t1020-cleanup later to maint).
The "log --decorate" enhancement in Git 2.4 that shows the commit at the tip of the current branch e.g. "HEAD -> master", did not work with --decorate=full. (merge 429ad20 mg/log-decorate-HEAD later to maint).
The ref API did not handle cases where 'refs/heads/xyzzy/frotz' is removed at the same time as 'refs/heads/xyzzy' is added (or vice versa) very well. (merge c628edf mh/ref-directory-file later to maint).
Multi-ref transaction support we merged a few releases ago unnecessarily kept many file descriptors open, risking to fail with resource exhaustion. This is for 2.4.x track. (merge 185ce3a mh/write-refs-sooner-2.4 later to maint).
"git bundle verify" did not diagnose extra parameters on the command line. (merge 7886cfa ps/bundle-verify-arg later to maint).
Various documentation mark-up fixes to make the output more consistent in general and also make AsciiDoctor (an alternative formatter) happier. (merge d0258b9 jk/asciidoc-markup-fix later to maint). (merge ad3967a jk/stripspace-asciidoctor-fix later to maint). (merge 975e382 ja/tutorial-asciidoctor-fix later to maint).
The code to read pack-bitmap wanted to allocate a few hundred pointers to a structure, but by mistake allocated and leaked memory enough to hold that many actual structures. Correct the allocation size and also have it on stack, as it is small enough. (merge 599dc76 rs/plug-leak-in-pack-bitmaps later to maint).
The pull.ff configuration was supposed to override the merge.ff configuration, but it didn't. (merge db9bb28 pt/pull-ff-vs-merge-ff later to maint).
"git pull --log" and "git pull --no-log" worked as expected, but "git pull --log=20" did not. (merge 5061a44 pt/pull-log-n later to maint).
"git rerere forget" in a repository without rerere enabled gave a cryptic error message; it should be a silent no-op instead. (merge 0544574 jk/rerere-forget-check-enabled later to maint).
"git rebase -i" fired post-rewrite hook when it shouldn't (namely, when it was told to stop sequencing with 'exec' insn). (merge 141ff8f mm/rebase-i-post-rewrite-exec later to maint).
Clarify that "log --raw" and "log --format=raw" are unrelated concepts. (merge 92de921 mm/log-format-raw-doc later to maint).
Make "git stash something --help" error out, so that users can safely say "git stash drop --help". (merge 5ba2831 jk/stash-options later to maint).
The clean/smudge interface did not work well when filtering an empty contents (failed and then passed the empty input through). It can be argued that a filter that produces anything but empty for an empty input is nonsense, but if the user wants to do strange things, then why not? (merge f6a1e1e jh/filter-empty-contents later to maint).
Communication between the HTTP server and http_backend process can lead to a dead-lock when relaying a large ref negotiation request. Diagnose the situation better, and mitigate it by reading such a request first into core (to a reasonable limit). (merge 636614f jk/http-backend-deadlock later to maint).
"git clean pathspec..." tried to lstat(2) and complain even for paths outside the given pathspec. (merge 838d6a9 dt/clean-pathspec-filter-then-lstat later to maint).
Recent "git prune" traverses young unreachable objects to safekeep old objects in the reachability chain from them, which sometimes caused error messages that are unnecessarily alarming. (merge ce4e7b2 jk/squelch-missing-link-warning-for-unreachable later to maint).
The configuration reader/writer uses mmap(2) interface to access the files; when we find a directory, it barfed with "Out of memory?". (merge 9ca0aaf jk/diagnose-config-mmap-failure later to maint).
"color.diff.plain" was a misnomer; give it 'color.diff.context' as a more logical synonym. (merge 8dbf3eb jk/color-diff-plain-is-context later to maint).
The setup code used to die when core.bare and core.worktree are set inconsistently, even for commands that do not need working tree. (merge fada767 jk/die-on-bogus-worktree-late later to maint).
Recent Mac OS X updates breaks the logic to detect that the machine is on the AC power in the sample pre-auto-gc script. (merge c54c7b3 pa/auto-gc-mac-osx later to maint).
"git commit --cleanup=scissors" was not careful enough to protect against getting fooled by a line that looked like scissors. (merge fbfa097 sg/commit-cleanup-scissors later to maint).
"Have we lost a race with competing repack?" check was too expensive, especially while receiving a huge object transfer that runs index-pack (e.g. "clone" or "fetch"). (merge 0eeb077 jk/index-pack-reduce-recheck later to maint).
The tcsh completion writes a bash scriptlet but that would have failed for users with noclobber set. (merge 0b1f688 af/tcsh-completion-noclobber later to maint).
"git for-each-ref" reported "missing object" for 0{40} when it encounters a broken ref. The lack of object whose name is 0{40} is not the problem; the ref being broken is. (merge 501cf47 mh/reporting-broken-refs-from-for-each-ref later to maint).
Various fixes around "git am" that applies a patch to a history that is not there yet. (merge 6ea3b67 pt/am-abort-fix later to maint).
"git fsck" used to ignore missing or invalid objects recorded in reflog. (merge 19bf6c9 mh/fsck-reflog-entries later to maint).
"git format-patch --ignore-if-upstream A..B" did not like to be fed tags as boundary commits. (merge 9b7a61d jc/do-not-feed-tags-to-clear-commit-marks later to maint).

New in Git 2.4.5 (Jun 26, 2015)

New in Git 2.4.4 (Jun 17, 2015)

New in Git 2.4.3 (Jun 6, 2015)

Fixes since v2.4.3:
Error messages from "git branch" called remote-tracking branches as "remote branches".
"git rerere forget" in a repository without rerere enabled gave a cryptic error message; it should be a silent no-op instead.
"git pull --log" and "git pull --no-log" worked as expected, but "git pull --log=20" did not.
The pull.ff configuration was supposed to override the merge.ff configuration, but it didn't.
The code to read pack-bitmap wanted to allocate a few hundred pointers to a structure, but by mistake allocated and leaked memory enough to hold that many actual structures. Correct the allocation size and also have it on stack, as it is small enough.
Various documentation mark-up fixes to make the output more consistent in general and also make AsciiDoctor (an alternative formatter) happier.
"git bundle verify" did not diagnose extra parameters on the command line.
Multi-ref transaction support we merged a few releases ago unnecessarily kept many file descriptors open, risking to fail with resource exhaustion.
The ref API did not handle cases where 'refs/heads/xyzzy/frotz' is removed at the same time as 'refs/heads/xyzzy' is added (or vice versa) very well.
The "log --decorate" enhancement in Git 2.4 that shows the commit at the tip of the current branch e.g. "HEAD -> master", did not work with --decorate=full.
There was a commented-out (instead of being marked to expect failure) test that documented a breakage that was fixed since the test was written; turn it into a proper test.
core.excludesfile (defaulting to $XDG_HOME/git/ignore) is supposed to be overridden by repository-specific .git/info/exclude file, but the order was swapped from the beginning. This belatedly fixes it.
The connection initiation code for "ssh" transport tried to absorb differences between the stock "ssh" and Putty-supplied "plink" and its derivatives, but the logic to tell that we are using "plink" variants were too loose and falsely triggered when "plink" appeared anywhere in the path (e.g. "/home/me/bin/uplink/ssh").
"git rebase -i" moved the "current" command from "todo" to "done" a bit too prematurely, losing a step when a "pick" did not even start.
"git add -e" did not allow the user to abort the operation by killing the editor.
Git 2.4 broke setting verbosity and progress levels on "git clone" with native transports.
Some time ago, "git blame" (incorrectly) lost the convert_to_git() call when synthesizing a fake "tip" commit that represents the state in the working tree, which broke folks who record the history with LF line ending to make their project portabile across platforms while terminating lines in their working tree files with CRLF for their platform.
Code clean-up for xdg configuration path support.
Also contains typofixes, documentation updates and trivial code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.4.2 (May 27, 2015)

New in Git 2.4.1 (May 14, 2015)

New in Git 2.4.0 (May 1, 2015)

BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY WARNING(S):
This release has a few changes in the user-visible output from Porcelain commands. These are not meant to be parsed by scripts, but users still may want to be aware of the changes:
The output from "git log --decorate" (and, more generally, the "%d" format specifier used in the "--format=" parameter to the "git log" family of commands) has changed. It used to list "HEAD" just like other branches; e.g., $ git log --decorate -1 master commit bdb0f6788fa5e3cacc4315e9ff318a27b2676ff4 (HEAD, master) ... This release changes the output slightly when HEAD refers to a branch whose name is also shown in the output. The above is now shown as: $ git log --decorate -1 master commit bdb0f6788fa5e3cacc4315e9ff318a27b2676ff4 (HEAD -> master) ...
The phrasing "git branch" uses to describe a detached HEAD has been updated to agree with the phrasing used by "git status": - When HEAD is at the same commit as when it was originally detached, they now both show "detached at ". - When HEAD has moved since it was originally detached, they now both show "detached from ". Previously, "git branch" always used "from".
UPDATES SINCE V2.3:
Ports:
Our default I/O size (8 MiB) for large files was too large for some platforms with smaller SSIZE_MAX, leading to read(2)/write(2) failures.
We did not check the curl library version before using the CURLOPT_PROXYAUTH feature, which did not exist in older versions of the library.
We now detect number of CPUs on older BSD-derived systems.
Portability fixes and workarounds for shell scripts have been added to help BSD-derived systems.
UI, Workflows & Features:
The command usage info strings given by "git cmd -h" and in documentation have been tweaked for consistency.
The "sync" subcommand of "git p4" now allows users to exclude subdirectories like its "clone" subcommand does.
"git log --invert-grep --grep=WIP" will show only commits that do not have the string "WIP" in their messages.
"git push" has been taught an "--atomic" option that makes a push that updates more than one ref an "all-or-none" affair.
Extending the "push to deploy" feature that was added in 2.3, the behaviour of "git push" when updating the branch that is checked out can now be tweaked by a "push-to-checkout" hook.
HTTP-based transports now send Accept-Language when making requests. The languages to accept are inferred from environment variables on the client side (LANGUAGE, etc).
"git send-email" used to accept a mistaken "y" (or "yes") as an answer to "What encoding do you want to use [UTF-8]?" without questioning. Now it asks for confirmation when the answer looks too short to be a valid encoding name.
When "git apply --whitespace=fix" fixed whitespace errors in the common context lines, the command reports that it did so.
"git status" now allows the "-v" option to be given twice, in which case it also shows the differences in the working tree that are not staged to be committed.
"git cherry-pick" used to clean up the log message even when it is merely replaying an existing commit. It now replays the message verbatim unless you are editing the message of the resulting commit.
"git archive" can now be told to set the 'text' attribute in the resulting zip archive.
Output from "git log --decorate" now distinguishes between a detached HEAD vs. a HEAD that points at a branch. This is a potentially backward-incompatible change; see above for more information.
When HEAD was detached when at commit xyz and hasn't been moved since it was detached, "git status" would report "detached at xyz" whereas "git branch" would report "detached from xyz". Now the output of "git branch" agrees with that of "git status". This is a potentially backward-incompatible change; see above for more information.
"git -C '' subcmd" now works in the current directory (analogously to "cd ''") rather than dying with an error message. (merge 6a536e2 kn/git-cd-to-empty later to maint).
The versionsort.prereleaseSuffix configuration variable can be used to specify that, for example, v1.0-pre1 comes before v1.0.
A new "push.followTags" configuration turns the "--follow-tags" option on by default for the "git push" command.
"git log --graph --no-walk A B..." is a nonsensical combination of options: "--no-walk" requests discrete points in the history, while "--graph" asks to draw connections between these discrete points. Forbid the use of these options together.
"git rev-list --bisect --first-parent" does not work (yet) and can even cause SEGV; forbid it. "git log --bisect --first-parent" would not be useful until "git bisect --first-parent" materializes, so also forbid it for now.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.:
Slightly change the implementation of the N_() macro to help us detect mistakes.
Restructure the implementation of "reflog expire" to fit better with the recently updated reference API.
The transport-helper did not pass transport options such as verbosity, progress, cloning, etc. to import and export based helpers, like it did for fetch and push based helpers, robbing them of the chance to honor the wish of the end-users better.
The tests that wanted to see that a file becomes unreadable after running "chmod a-r file", and the tests that wanted to make sure that they are not run as root, used "can we write into the / directory?" as a cheap substitute. But on some platforms that is not a good heuristic. The tests and their prerequisites have been updated to check what they really require. (merge f400e51 jk/sanity later to maint).
Various issues around "reflog expire", e.g. using --updateref when expiring a reflog for a symbolic reference, have been corrected and/or made saner.
The documentation for the strbuf API had been split between the API documentation and the header file. Consolidate the documentation in strbuf.h.
The error handling functions and conventions are now documented in the API manual (in api-error-handling.txt).
Optimize gitattribute look-up, mostly useful in "git grep" on a project that does not use many attributes, by avoiding it when we (should) know that the attributes are not defined in the first place.
Typofix in comments. (merge ef2956a ak/git-pm-typofix later to maint).
Code clean-up. (merge 0b868f0 sb/hex-object-name-is-at-most-41-bytes-long later to maint). (merge 5d30851 dp/remove-duplicated-header-inclusion later to maint).
Simplify the ref transaction API for verifying that "the ref should be pointing at this object".
Simplify the code in "git daemon" that parses out and holds hostnames used in request interpolation.
Restructure the "git push" codepath to make it easier to add new configuration bits.
The run-command interface made it easy to make a pipe for us to read from a process, wait for the process to finish, and then attempt to read its output. But this pattern can lead to deadlock. So introduce a helper to do this correctly (i.e., first read, and then wait the process to finish) and also add code to prevent such abuse in the run-command helper.
People often forget to chain the commands in their test together with &&, letting a failure from an earlier command in the test go unnoticed. The new GIT_TEST_CHAIN_LINT mechanism allows you to catch such a mistake more easily.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.3:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.3 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' notes for details).
"git blame HEAD -- missing" failed to correctly say "HEAD" when it tried to say "No such path 'missing' in HEAD". (merge a46442f jk/blame-commit-label later to maint).
"git rerere" (invoked internally from many mergy operations) did not correctly signal errors when it attempted to update the working tree files but failed for whatever reason. (merge 89ea903 jn/rerere-fail-on-auto-update-failure later to maint).
Setting diff.submodule to 'log' made "git format-patch" produce broken patches. (merge 339de50 dk/format-patch-ignore-diff-submodule later to maint).
After attempting and failing a password-less authentication (e.g., Kerberos), libcURL refuses to fall back to password-based Basic authentication without a bit of help/encouragement. (merge 4dbe664 bc/http-fallback-to-password-after-krb-fails later to maint).
The "git push" documentation for the "--repo=" option was easily misunderstood. (merge 57b92a7 mg/push-repo-option-doc later to maint).
Code to read a branch name from various files in the .git/ directory would have overrun array limits if asked to read an empty file. (merge 66ec904 jk/status-read-branch-name-fix later to maint).
Remove a superfluous conditional that is always true. (merge 94ee8e2 jk/remote-curl-an-array-in-struct-cannot-be-null later to maint).
The "git diff --raw" documentation incorrectly implied that C(opy) and R(ename) are the only statuses that can be followed by a score number. (merge ac1c2d9 jc/diff-format-doc later to maint).
A broken pack .idx file in the receiving repository prevented the dumb http transport from fetching a good copy of it from the other side. (merge 8b9c2dd jk/dumb-http-idx-fetch-fix later to maint).
The error message from "git commit", when a non-existing author name was given as value to the "--author=" parameter, has been reworded to avoid misunderstanding. (merge 1044b1f mg/commit-author-no-match-malformed-message later to maint).
"git log --help" used to show rev-list options that are irrelevant to the "log" command. (merge 3cab02d jc/doc-log-rev-list-options later to maint).
"git apply --whitespace=fix" used to under-allocate memory when the fix resulted in a longer text than the original patch. (merge 407a792 jc/apply-ws-fix-expands later to maint).
The interactive "show a list and let the user choose from it" interface used by "git add -i" unnecessarily prompted the user even when the candidate list was empty, against which the only "choice" the user could have made was to choose nothing. (merge a9c4641 ak/add-i-empty-candidates later to maint).
The todo list created by "git rebase -i" did not fully honor core.abbrev settings. (merge edb72d5 ks/rebase-i-abbrev later to maint).
"git fetch" over a remote-helper that cannot respond to the "list" command could not fetch from a symbolic reference (e.g., HEAD). (merge 33cae54 mh/deref-symref-over-helper-transport later to maint).
"git push --signed" gave an incorrectly worded error message when the other side did not support the capability.
The "git push --signed" protocol extension did not limit what the "nonce" (a server-chosen string) could contain nor how long it could be, which was unnecessarily lax. Limit both the length and the alphabet to a reasonably small space that can still have enough entropy. (merge afcb6ee jc/push-cert later to maint).
The completion script (in contrib/) clobbered the shell variable $x in the global shell namespace. (merge 852ff1c ma/bash-completion-leaking-x later to maint).
We incorrectly formatted a "uintmax_t" integer that doesn't fit in "int". (merge d306f3d jk/decimal-width-for-uintmax later to maint).
The configuration parser used to be confused when reading configuration from a blob object that ends with a lone CR. (merge 1d0655c jk/config-no-ungetc-eof later to maint).
The pack bitmap support did not build with older versions of GCC. (merge bd4e882 jk/pack-bitmap later to maint).
The documentation wasn't clear that "remote..pushURL" and "remote..URL" are there to name the same repository accessed via different transports, not two separate repositories. (merge 697f652 jc/remote-set-url-doc later to maint).
Older GnuPG implementations may not correctly import the keyring material we prepare for the tests to use. (merge 1f985d6 ch/new-gpg-drops-rfc-1991 later to maint).
The credential helper for Windows (in contrib/) used to mishandle user names that contain an at-sign. (merge 13d261e av/wincred-with-at-in-username-fix later to maint).
"diff-highlight" (in contrib/) used to show byte-by-byte differences, which could cause multi-byte characters to be chopped in the middle. It learned to pay attention to character boundaries (assuming UTF-8). (merge 8d00662 jk/colors later to maint).
Document longstanding configuration variable naming rules in CodingGuidelines. (merge 35840a3 jc/conf-var-doc later to maint).
An earlier workaround to squelch unhelpful deprecation warnings from the compiler on OS X unnecessarily set a minimum required version of the OS, which the user might want to raise (or lower) for other reasons. (merge 88c03eb es/squelch-openssl-warnings-on-macosx later to maint).
Certain older vintages of cURL give irregular output from "curl-config --vernum", which confused our build system. (merge 3af6792 tc/curl-vernum-output-broken-in-7.11 later to maint).
In v2.2.0, we broke "git prune" that runs in a repository that borrows from an alternate object store. (merge b0a4264 jk/prune-mtime later to maint).
"git submodule add" failed to squash "path/to/././submodule" to "path/to/submodule". (merge 8196e72 ps/submodule-sanitize-path-upon-add later to maint).
"git merge-file" did not work correctly when invoked in a subdirectory. (merge 204a8ff ab/merge-file-prefix later to maint).
"git blame" could die trying to free an uninitialized piece of memory. (merge e600592 es/blame-commit-info-fix later to maint).
"git fast-import" used to crash when it could not close and finalize the resulting packfile cleanly. (merge 5e915f3 jk/fast-import-die-nicely-fix later to maint).
"update-index --refresh" used to leak memory when an entry could not be refreshed for whatever reason. (merge bc1c2ca sb/plug-leak-in-make-cache-entry later to maint).
The "interpolated-path" option of "git daemon" inserted any string the client declared on the "host=" capability request without checking. Sanitize and limit %H and %CH to a saner and a valid DNS name. (merge b485373 jk/daemon-interpolate later to maint).
"git daemon" unnecessarily looked up the hostname even when "%CH" and "%IP" interpolations were not requested. (merge dc8edc8 rs/daemon-interpolate later to maint).
We relied on "--no-" prefix handling in Perl's Getopt::Long package, even though that support didn't exist in Perl 5.8 (which we still support). Manually add support to help people with older Getopt::Long packages. (merge f471494 km/send-email-getopt-long-workarounds later to maint).
"git apply" was not very careful about reading from, removing, updating and creating paths outside the working tree (under --index/--cached) or the current directory (when used as a replacement for GNU patch). (merge e0d201b jc/apply-beyond-symlink later to maint).
Correct a breakage in git-svn, introduced around the v2.2 era, that can cause FileHandles to be closed prematurely. (merge e426311 ew/svn-maint-fixes later to maint).
We did not parse usernames followed by literal IPv6 addresses correctly in SSH transport URLs; e.g., ssh://user@[2001:db8::1]:22/repo.git. (merge 6b6c5f7 tb/connect-ipv6-parse-fix later to maint).
The configuration variable 'mailinfo.scissors' was hard to discover in the documentation. (merge afb5de7 mm/am-c-doc later to maint).
The interaction between "git submodule update" and the submodule.*.update configuration was not clearly documented. (merge 5c31acf ms/submodule-update-config-doc later to maint).
"git diff --shortstat" used together with "--dirstat=changes" or "--dirstat=files" incorrectly output dirstat information twice. (merge ab27389 mk/diff-shortstat-dirstat-fix later to maint).
The manpage for "git remote add" mentioned "--tags" and "--no-tags" but did not explain what happens if neither option is provided. (merge aaba0ab mg/doc-remote-tags-or-not later to maint).
The description of "--exclude-standard option" in the output of "git grep -h" was phrased poorly. (merge 77fdb8a nd/grep-exclude-standard-help-fix later to maint).
"git rebase -i" recently started to include the number of commits in the todo list, but that output included extraneous whitespace on a platform that prepends leading whitespaces to its "wc -l" output. (merge 2185d3b es/rebase-i-count-todo later to maint).
The borrowed code in the kwset API did not follow our usual convention to use "unsigned char" to store values that range from 0-255. (merge 189c860 bw/kwset-use-unsigned later to maint).
A corrupt input to "git diff -M" used to cause it to segfault. (merge 4d6be03 jk/diffcore-rename-duplicate later to maint).
Certain builds of GPG triggered false breakages in a test. (merge 3f88c1b mg/verify-commit later to maint).
"git imap-send" learned to optionally talk with an IMAP server via libcURL. Because there is no other option when Git is built with the NO_OPENSSL option, use libcURL by default in that case. (merge dcd01ea km/imap-send-libcurl-options later to maint).
"git log --decorate" did not reset colors correctly around the branch names. (merge 5ee8758 jc/decorate-leaky-separator-color later to maint).
The code that reads from the ctags file in the completion script (in contrib/) did not spell ${param/pattern/string} substitution correctly, which happened to work with bash but not with zsh. (merge db8d750 js/completion-ctags-pattern-substitution-fix later to maint).
The transfer.hiderefs support did not quite work for smart-http transport. (merge 8ddf3ca jk/smart-http-hide-refs later to maint).
In the "git tag -h" output, move the documentation for the "--column" and "--sort" options to the "Tag listing options" section. (merge dd059c6 jk/tag-h-column-is-a-listing-option later to maint).
"git prune" used to largely ignore broken refs when deciding which objects are still being used, which could cause reference corruption to lead to object loss. (merge ea56c4e jk/prune-with-corrupt-refs later to maint).
The split-index mode introduced in v2.3.0-rc0~41 was broken in the codepath to protect us against a broken reimplementation of Git that writes an invalid index with duplicated index entries, etc. (merge 03f15a7 tg/fix-check-order-with-split-index later to maint).
"git fetch", when fetching a commit using the allow-tip-sha1-in-want extension, could have failed to fetch all of the requested refs. (merge 32d0462 jk/fetch-pack later to maint).
An failure early in the "git clone" that started creating the working tree and repository could have resulted in the failure to clean up some directories and files. (merge 16eff6c jk/cleanup-failed-clone later to maint).
Recommend format-patch and send-email for those who want to submit patches to this project. (merge b25c469 jc/submitting-patches-mention-send-email later to maint).
Do not spawn the pager when "git grep" is run with "--quiet". (merge c2048f0 ws/grep-quiet-no-pager later to maint).
The prompt script (in contrib/) did not show the untracked sign when working in a subdirectory without any untracked files. (merge 9bdc517 ct/prompt-untracked-fix later to maint).
An earlier update to the URL parser broke an address that contains a colon but an empty string for the port number, like ssh://example.com:/path/to/repo. (merge 6b6c5f7 tb/connect-ipv6-parse-fix later to maint).
Code cleanups and documentation updates:
(merge 2ce63e9 rs/simple-cleanups later to maint).
(merge 33baa69 rj/no-xopen-source-for-cygwin later to maint).
(merge 817d03e jc/diff-test-updates later to maint).
(merge eb32c66 ak/t5516-typofix later to maint).
(merge bcd57cb mr/doc-clean-f-f later to maint).
(merge 0d6accc mg/doc-status-color-slot later to maint).
(merge 53e53c7 sg/completion-remote later to maint).
(merge 8fa7975 ak/git-done-help-cleanup later to maint).
(merge 9a6f128 rs/deflate-init-cleanup later to maint).
(merge 6f75d45 rs/use-isxdigit later to maint).
(merge 376e4b3 jk/test-annoyances later to maint).
(merge 7032054 nd/doc-git-index-version later to maint).
(merge e869c5e tg/test-index-v4 later to maint).
(merge 599d223 jk/simplify-csum-file-sha1fd-check later to maint).
(merge 260d585 sg/completion-gitcomp-nl-for-refs later to maint).
(merge 777c55a jc/report-path-error-to-dir later to maint).
(merge fddfaf8 ph/push-doc-cas later to maint).
(merge d50d31e ss/pull-rebase-preserve later to maint).
(merge c8c3f1d pt/enter-repo-comment-fix later to maint).
(merge d7bfb9e jz/gitweb-conf-doc-fix later to maint).
(merge f907282 jk/cherry-pick-docfix later to maint).
(merge d3c0811 iu/fix-parse-options-h-comment later to maint).
(merge 6c3b2af jg/cguide-we-cannot-count later to maint).
(merge 2b8bd44 jk/pack-corruption-post-mortem later to maint).
(merge 9585cb8 jn/doc-fast-import-no-16-octopus-limit later to maint).
(merge 5dcd1b1 ps/grep-help-all-callback-arg later to maint).
(merge f1f4c84 va/fix-git-p4-tests later to maint).

New in Git 2.3.7 (Apr 28, 2015)

New in Git 2.3.6 (Apr 22, 2015)

New in Git 2.3.5 (Apr 1, 2015)

New in Git 2.4.0 RC 0 (Mar 27, 2015)

UPDATES SINCE V2.3:
Ports:
Our default I/O size (8 MiB) for large files was too large for some platforms with smaller SSIZE_MAX, leading to read(2)/write(2) failures.
We did not check the curl library version before using CURLOPT_PROXYAUTH feature that may not exist.
We now detect number of CPUs on older BSD-derived systems.
Portability fixes and workarounds for shell scripts have been added to help BSD-derived systems.
UI, Workflows & Features:
The command usage info strings given by "git cmd -h" and in documentation have been tweaked for consistency.
The "sync" subcommand of "git p4" now allows users to exclude subdirectories like its "clone" subcommand does.
"git log --invert-grep --grep=WIP" will show only commits that do not have the string "WIP" in their messages.
"git push" has been taught a "--atomic" option that makes push to update more than one ref an "all-or-none" affair.
Extending the "push to deploy" added in 2.3, the behaviour of "git push" when updating the branch that is checked out can now be tweaked by push-to-checkout hook.
Using environment variable LANGUAGE and friends on the client side, HTTP-based transports now send Accept-Language when making requests.
"git send-email" used to accept a mistaken "y" (or "yes") as an answer to "What encoding do you want to use [UTF-8]? " without questioning. Now it asks for confirmation when the answer looks too short to be a valid encoding name.
When "git apply --whitespace=fix" fixed whitespace errors in the common context lines, the command reports that it did so.
"git status" now allows the "-v" to be given twice to show the differences that are left in the working tree not to be committed.
"git cherry-pick" used to clean-up the log message even when it is merely replaying an existing commit. It now replays the message verbatim unless you are editing the message of resulting commits.
"git archive" can now be told to set the 'text' attribute in the resulting zip archive.
Output from "git log --decorate" mentions HEAD when it points at a tip of an branch differently from a detached HEAD. This is a potentially backward-incompatible change.
"git branch" on a detached HEAD always said "(detached from xyz)", even when "git status" would report "detached at xyz". The HEAD is actually at xyz and haven't been moved since it was detached in such a case, but the user cannot read what the current value of HEAD is when "detached from" is used.
"git -C '' subcmd" refused to work in the current directory, unlike "cd ''" which silently behaves as a no-op. (merge 6a536e2 kn/git-cd-to-empty later to maint).
The versionsort.prerelease configuration variable can be used to specify that v1.0-pre1 comes before v1.0.
A new "push.followTags" configuration turns the "--follow-tags" option on by default for the "git push" command.
"git log --graph --no-walk A B..." is a conflicting request that asks nonsense; no-walk tells us show discrete points in the history, while graph asks to draw connections between these discrete points. Forbid the combination.
"git rev-list --bisect --first-parent" does not work (yet) and can even cause SEGV; forbid it. "git log --bisect --first-parent" would not be useful until "git bisect --first-parent" materializes, so it is also forbidden for now.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
Implementation of N_() macro has been updated slightly to help us detect mistakes.
Implementation of "reflog expire" has been restructured to fit the reflogs better with the recently updated ref API.
The transport-helper did not give transport options such as verbosity, progress, cloning, etc. to import and export based helpers, like it did for fetch and push based helpers, robbing them the chance to honor the wish of the end-users better.
The tests that wanted to see that file becomes unreadable after running "chmod a-r file", and the tests that wanted to make sure it is not run as root, we used "can we write into the / directory?" as a cheap substitute, but on some platforms that is not a good heuristics. The tests and their prerequisites have been updated to check what they really require. (merge f400e51 jk/sanity later to maint).
Various issues around "reflog expire", e.g. using --updateref when expiring a reflog for a symbolic reference, have been corrected and/or made saner.
The strbuf API was explained between the API documentation and in the header file. Move missing bits to strbuf.h so that programmers can check only one place for all necessary information.
The error handling functions and conventions are now documented in the API manual.
Optimize attribute look-up, mostly useful in "git grep" on a project that does not use many attributes, by avoiding it when we (should) know that the attributes are not defined in the first place.
Typofix in comments. (merge ef2956a ak/git-pm-typofix later to maint).
Code clean-up. (merge 0b868f0 sb/hex-object-name-is-at-most-41-bytes-long later to maint). (merge 5d30851 dp/remove-duplicated-header-inclusion later to maint).
Simplify the ref transaction API around how "the ref should be pointing at this object" is specified.
Code in "git daemon" to parse out and hold hostnames used in request interpolation has been simplified.
"git push" codepath has been restructured to make it easier to add new configuration bits.
The run-command interface was easy to abuse and make a pipe for us to read from the process, wait for the process to finish and then attempt to read its output, which is a pattern that lead to a deadlock. Fix such uses by introducing a helper to do this correctly (i.e. we need to read first and then wait the process to finish) and also add code to prevent such abuse in the run-command helper.
People often forget to chain the commands in their test together with &&, leaving a failure from an earlier command in the test go unnoticed. The new GIT_TEST_CHAIN_LINT mechanism allows you to catch such a mistake more easily. Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.3:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.3 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' notes for details).
"git blame HEAD -- missing" failed to correctly say "HEAD" when it tried to say "No such path 'missing' in HEAD". (merge a46442f jk/blame-commit-label later to maint).
"git rerere" (invoked internally from many mergy operations) did not correctly signal errors when told to update the working tree files and failed to do so for whatever reason. (merge 89ea903 jn/rerere-fail-on-auto-update-failure later to maint).
Setting diff.submodule to 'log' made "git format-patch" produce broken patches. (merge 339de50 dk/format-patch-ignore-diff-submodule later to maint).
After attempting and failing a password-less authentication (e.g. kerberos), libcURL refuses to fall back to password based Basic authentication without a bit of help/encouragement. (merge 4dbe664 bc/http-fallback-to-password-after-krb-fails later to maint).
The "git push" documentation made the "--repo=" option easily misunderstood. (merge 57b92a7 mg/push-repo-option-doc later to maint).
Code to read branch name from various files in .git/ directory would have misbehaved if the code to write them left an empty file. (merge 66ec904 jk/status-read-branch-name-fix later to maint).
A misspelled conditional that is always true has been fixed. (merge 94ee8e2 jk/remote-curl-an-array-in-struct-cannot-be-null later to maint).
The documentation incorrectly said that C(opy) and R(ename) are the only ones that can be followed by the score number in the output in the --raw format. (merge ac1c2d9 jc/diff-format-doc later to maint).
A broken pack .idx file in the receiving repository prevented the dumb http transport from fetching a good copy of it from the other side. (merge 8b9c2dd jk/dumb-http-idx-fetch-fix later to maint).
The error message from "git commit", when a non-existing author name was given as value to the "--author=" parameter, has been reworded to avoid misunderstanding. (merge 1044b1f mg/commit-author-no-match-malformed-message later to maint).
"git log --help" used to show rev-list options that are irrelevant to the "log" command. (merge 3cab02d jc/doc-log-rev-list-options later to maint).
"git apply --whitespace=fix" used to under-allocate the memory when the fix resulted in a longer text than the original patch. (merge 407a792 jc/apply-ws-fix-expands later to maint).
The interactive "show a list and let the user choose from it" interface "add -i" used showed and prompted to the user even when the candidate list was empty, against which the only "choice" the user could have made was to choose nothing. (merge a9c4641 ak/add-i-empty-candidates later to maint).
The insn sheet "git rebase -i" creates did not fully honor core.abbrev settings. (merge edb72d5 ks/rebase-i-abbrev later to maint).
"git fetch" over a remote-helper that cannot respond to "list" command could not fetch from a symbolic reference e.g. HEAD. (merge 33cae54 mh/deref-symref-over-helper-transport later to maint).
"git push --signed" gave an incorrectly worded error message when the other side did not support the capability. (merge 45917f0 jc/push-cert later to maint).
We didn't format an integer that wouldn't fit in "int" but in "uintmax_t" correctly. (merge d306f3d jk/decimal-width-for-uintmax later to maint).
Reading configuration from a blob object, when it ends with a lone CR, use to confuse the configuration parser. (merge 1d0655c jk/config-no-ungetc-eof later to maint).
The pack bitmap support did not build with older versions of GCC. (merge bd4e882 jk/pack-bitmap later to maint).
The documentation wasn't clear that "remote..pushURL" and "remote..URL" are there to name the same repository accessed via different transports, not two separate repositories. (merge 697f652 jc/remote-set-url-doc later to maint).
Older GnuPG implementations may not correctly import the keyring material we prepare for the tests to use. (merge 1f985d6 ch/new-gpg-drops-rfc-1991 later to maint).
The credential helper for Windows (in contrib/) used to mishandle a user name with an at-sign in it. (merge 13d261e av/wincred-with-at-in-username-fix later to maint).
Longstanding configuration variable naming rules has been added to the documentation. (merge 35840a3 jc/conf-var-doc later to maint).
An earlier workaround to squelch unhelpful deprecation warnings from the complier on Mac OSX unnecessarily set minimum required version of the OS, which the user might want to raise (or lower) for other reasons. (merge 88c03eb es/squelch-openssl-warnings-on-macosx later to maint).
Certain older vintages of cURL give irregular output from "curl-config --vernum", which confused our build system. (merge 3af6792 tc/curl-vernum-output-broken-in-7.11 later to maint).
In v2.2.0, we broke "git prune" that runs in a repository that borrows from an alternate object store. (merge b0a4264 jk/prune-mtime later to maint).
"git submodule add" failed to squash "path/to/././submodule" to "path/to/submodule". (merge 8196e72 ps/submodule-sanitize-path-upon-add later to maint).
"git merge-file" did not work correctly in a subdirectory. (merge 204a8ff ab/merge-file-prefix later to maint).
"git blame" died, trying to free an uninitialized piece of memory. (merge e600592 es/blame-commit-info-fix later to maint).
"git fast-import" used to crash when it could not close and conclude the resulting packfile cleanly. (merge 5e915f3 jk/fast-import-die-nicely-fix later to maint).
"update-index --refresh" used to leak when an entry cannot be refreshed for whatever reason. (merge bc1c2ca sb/plug-leak-in-make-cache-entry later to maint).
The "interpolated-path" option of "git daemon" inserted any string client declared on the "host=" capability request without checking. Sanitize and limit %H and %CH to a saner and a valid DNS name. (merge b485373 jk/daemon-interpolate later to maint).
"git daemon" looked up the hostname even when "%CH" and "%IP" interpolations are not requested, which was unnecessary. (merge dc8edc8 rs/daemon-interpolate later to maint).
Even though we officially haven't dropped Perl 5.8 support, the Getopt::Long package that came with it does not support "--no-" prefix to negate a boolean option; manually add support to help people with older Getopt::Long package. (merge f471494 km/send-email-getopt-long-workarounds later to maint).
"git apply" was not very careful about reading from, removing, updating and creating paths outside the working tree (under --index/--cached) or the current directory (when used as a replacement for GNU patch). (merge e0d201b jc/apply-beyond-symlink later to maint).
A breakage to git-svn around v2.2 era that triggers premature closing of FileHandle has been corrected. (merge e426311 ew/svn-maint-fixes later to maint).
We did not parse username followed by literal IPv6 address in SSH transport URLs, e.g. ssh://user@[2001:db8::1]:22/repo.git correctly. (merge 3f55cca tb/connect-ipv6-parse-fix later to maint).
The configuration variable 'mailinfo.scissors' was hard to discover in the documentation. (merge afb5de7 mm/am-c-doc later to maint).
The interaction between "git submodule update" and the submodule.*.update configuration was not clearly documented. (merge 5c31acf ms/submodule-update-config-doc later to maint).
"git diff --shortstat --dirstat=changes" showed a dirstat based on lines that was never asked by the end user in addition to the dirstat that the user asked for. (merge ab27389 mk/diff-shortstat-dirstat-fix later to maint).
"git remote add" mentioned "--tags" and "--no-tags" and was not clear that fetch from the remote in the future will use the default behaviour when neither is given to override it. (merge aaba0ab mg/doc-remote-tags-or-not later to maint).
Description given by "grep -h" for its --exclude-standard option was phrased poorly. (merge 77fdb8a nd/grep-exclude-standard-help-fix later to maint).
"git rebase -i" recently started to include the number of commits in the insn sheet to be processed, but on a platform that prepends leading whitespaces to "wc -l" output, the numbers are shown with extra whitespaces that aren't necessary. (merge 2185d3b es/rebase-i-count-todo later to maint).
The borrowed code in kwset API did not follow our usual convention to use "unsigned char" to store values that range from 0-255. (merge 189c860 bw/kwset-use-unsigned later to maint).
A corrupt input to "git diff -M" used to cause it to segfault. (merge 4d6be03 jk/diffcore-rename-duplicate later to maint).
Certain builds of GPG triggered false breakages in a test. (merge 3f88c1b mg/verify-commit later to maint).
"git imap-send" learned to optionally talk with an IMAP server via libcURL; because there is no other option when Git is built with NO_OPENSSL option, use that codepath by default under such configuration. (merge dcd01ea km/imap-send-libcurl-options later to maint).
"git log --decorate" did not reset colors correctly around the branch names. (merge 5ee8758 jc/decorate-leaky-separator-color later to maint).
The code that reads from the ctags file in the completion script (in contrib/) did not spell ${param/pattern/string} substitution correctly, which happened to work with bash but not with zsh. (merge db8d750 js/completion-ctags-pattern-substitution-fix later to maint).
The transfer.hiderefs support did not quite work for smart-http transport. (merge 8ddf3ca jk/smart-http-hide-refs later to maint).
"git tag -h" used to show the "--column" and "--sort" options that are about listing in a wrong section. (merge dd059c6 jk/tag-h-column-is-a-listing-option later to maint).
"git prune" used to largely ignore broken refs when deciding which objects are still being used, which could spread an existing small damage and make it a larger one. (merge ea56c4e jk/prune-with-corrupt-refs later to maint).
The split-index mode introduced at v2.3.0-rc0~41 was broken in the codepath to protect us against a broken reimplementation of Git that writes an invalid index with duplicated index entries, etc. (merge 03f15a7 tg/fix-check-order-with-split-index later to maint).
"git fetch" that fetches a commit using the allow-tip-sha1-in-want extension could have failed to fetch all the requested refs. (merge 32d0462 jk/fetch-pack later to maint).
An failure early in the "git clone" that started creating the working tree and repository could have resulted in some directories and files left without getting cleaned up. (merge 16eff6c jk/cleanup-failed-clone later to maint).
Recommend format-patch and send-email for those who want to submit patches to this project. (merge b25c469 jc/submitting-patches-mention-send-email later to maint).
Even though "git grep --quiet" is run merely to ask for the exit status, we spawned the pager regardless. Stop doing that. (merge c2048f0 ws/grep-quiet-no-pager later to maint).
The prompt script (in contrib/) did not show the untracked sign when working in a subdirectory without any untracked files. (merge 9bdc517 ct/prompt-untracked-fix later to maint).
Code cleanups and documentation updates.

New in Git 2.3.4 (Mar 24, 2015)

New in Git 2.3.3 (Mar 16, 2015)

New in Git 2.3.2 (Mar 7, 2015)

Fixes:
"update-index --refresh" used to leak when an entry cannot be refreshed for whatever reason.
"git fast-import" used to crash when it could not close and conclude the resulting packfile cleanly.
"git blame" died, trying to free an uninitialized piece of memory.
"git merge-file" did not work correctly in a subdirectory.
"git submodule add" failed to squash "path/to/././submodule" to "path/to/submodule".
In v2.2.0, we broke "git prune" that runs in a repository that borrows from an alternate object store.
Certain older vintages of cURL give irregular output from "curl-config --vernum", which confused our build system.
An earlier workaround to squelch unhelpful deprecation warnings from the complier on Mac OSX unnecessarily set minimum required version of the OS, which the user might want to raise (or lower) for other reasons.
Longstanding configuration variable naming rules has been added to the documentation.
The credential helper for Windows (in contrib/) used to mishandle a user name with an at-sign in it.
Older GnuPG implementations may not correctly import the keyring material we prepare for the tests to use.
Clarify in the documentation that "remote..pushURL" and "remote..URL" are there to name the same repository accessed via different transports, not two separate repositories.
The pack bitmap support did not build with older versions of GCC.
Reading configuration from a blob object, when it ends with a lone CR, use to confuse the configuration parser.
We didn't format an integer that wouldn't fit in "int" but in "uintmax_t" correctly.
"git push --signed" gave an incorrectly worded error message when the other side did not support the capability.
"git fetch" over a remote-helper that cannot respond to "list" command could not fetch from a symbolic reference e.g. HEAD.
The insn sheet "git rebase -i" creates did not fully honor core.abbrev settings.
The tests that wanted to see that file becomes unreadable after running "chmod a-r file", and the tests that wanted to make sure it is not run as root, we used "can we write into the / directory?" as a cheap substitute, but on some platforms that is not a good heuristics. The tests and their prerequisites have been updated to check what they really require.
The configuration variable 'mailinfo.scissors' was hard to discover in the documentation.
Correct a breakage to git-svn around v2.2 era that triggers premature closing of FileHandle.
Even though we officially haven't dropped Perl 5.8 support, the Getopt::Long package that came with it does not support "--no-" prefix to negate a boolean option; manually add support to help people with older Getopt::Long package.
Also contains typofixes, documentation updates and trivial code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.3.1 (Feb 25, 2015)

New in Git 2.3.0 (Feb 6, 2015)

This one ended up to be a release with lots of small corrections and improvements without big uncomfortably exciting features. The recent security fix that went to 2.2.1 and older maintenance tracks is also contained in this update.
UPDATES SINCE V2.2:
Ports:
Recent gcc toolchain on Cygwin started throwing compilation warning, which has been squelched.
A few updates to build on platforms that lack tv_nsec, clock_gettime, CLOCK_MONOTONIC and HMAC_CTX_cleanup (e.g. older RHEL) have been added.
UI, Workflows & Features:
It was cumbersome to use "GIT_SSH" mechanism when the user wanted to pass an extra set of arguments to the underlying ssh. A new environment variable GIT_SSH_COMMAND can be used for this.
A request to store an empty note via "git notes" meant to remove note from the object but with --allow-empty we will store a (surprise!) note that is empty.
"git interpret-trailers" learned to properly handle the "Conflicts:" block at the end.
"git am" learned "--message-id" option to copy the message ID of the incoming e-mail to the log message of resulting commit.
"git clone --reference=" learned the "--dissociate" option to go with it; it borrows objects from the reference object store while cloning only to reduce network traffic and then dissociates the resulting clone from the reference by performing local copies of borrowed objects.
"git send-email" learned "--transfer-encoding" option to force a non-fault Content-Transfer-Encoding header (e.g. base64).
"git send-email" normally identifies itself via X-Mailer: header in the message it sends out. A new command line flag --no-xmailer allows the user to squelch the header.
"git push" into a repository with a working tree normally refuses to modify the branch that is checked out. The command learned to optionally do an equivalent of "git reset --hard" only when there is no change to the working tree and the index instead, which would be useful to "deploy" by pushing into a repository.
"git new-workdir" (in contrib/) can be used to populate an empty and existing directory now.
Credential helpers are asked in turn until one of them give positive response, which is cumbersome to turn off when you need to run Git in an automated setting. The credential helper interface learned to allow a helper to say "stop, don't ask other helpers." Also GIT_TERMINAL_PROMPT environment can be set to false to disable our built-in prompt mechanism for passwords.
"git branch -d" (delete) and "git branch -m" (move) learned to honor "-f" (force) flag; unlike many other subcommands, the way to force these have been with separate "-D/-M" options, which was inconsistent.
"diff-highlight" filter (in contrib/) allows its color output to be customized via configuration variables.
"git imap-send" learned to take "-v" (verbose) and "-q" (quiet) command line options.
"git remote add $name $URL" is now allowed when "url.$URL.insteadOf" is already defined.
"git imap-send" now can be built to use cURL library to talk to IMAP servers (if the library is recent enough, of course). This allows you to use authenticate method other than CRAM-MD5, among other things.
"git imap-send" now allows GIT_CURL_VERBOSE environment variable to control the verbosity when talking via the cURL library.
The prompt script (in contrib/) learned to optionally hide prompt when in an ignored directory by setting GIT_PS1_HIDE_IF_PWD_IGNORED shell variable.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.:
Earlier we made "rev-list --object-edge" more aggressively list the objects at the edge commits, in order to reduce number of objects　 fetched into a shallow repository, but the change affected cases other than "fetching into a shallow repository" and made it unusably slow (e.g. fetching into a normal repository should not have to suffer the overhead from extra processing). Limit it to a more specific case by introducing --objects-edge-aggressive, a new option to rev-list.
Squelched useless compiler warnings on Mac OS X regarding the crypto API.
The procedure to generate unicode table has been simplified.
Some filesystems assign filemodes in a strange way, fooling then automatic "filemode trustability" check done during a new repository creation. The initialization codepath has been hardened against this issue.
The codepath in "git remote update --prune" to drop many refs has been optimized.
The API into get_merge_bases*() family of functions was easy to misuse, which has been corrected to make it harder to do so.
Long overdue departure from the assumption that S_IFMT is shared by everybody made in 2005, which was necessary to port to z/OS.
"git push" and "git fetch" did not communicate an overlong refname correctly. Now it uses 64kB sideband to accommodate longer ones.
Recent GPG changes the keyring format and drops support for RFC1991 formatted signatures, breaking our existing tests.
"git-prompt" (in contrib/) used a variable from the global scope, possibly contaminating end-user's namespace.
FIXES SINCE V2.2:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.2 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' notes for details).
"git http-push" over WebDAV (aka dumb http-push) was broken in v2.2.2 when parsing a symbolic ref, resulting in a bogus request that gets rejected by recent versions of cURL library. (merge f6786c8 jk/http-push-symref-fix later to maint).
The logic in "git bisect bad HEAD" etc. to avoid forcing the test of the common ancestor of bad and good commits was broken. (merge 07913d5 cc/bisect-rev-parsing later to maint).
"git checkout-index --temp=$target $path" did not work correctly for paths outside the current subdirectory in the project. (merge 74c4de5 es/checkout-index-temp later to maint).
The report from "git checkout" on a branch that builds on another local branch by setting its branch.*.merge to branch name (not a full refname) incorrectly said that the upstream is gone. (merge 05e7368 jc/checkout-local-track-report later to maint).
With The git-prompt support (in contrib/), using the exit status of the last command in the prompt, e.g. PS1='$(__git_ps1) $? ', did not work well, because the helper function stomped on the exit status. (merge 6babe76 tf/prompt-preserve-exit-status later to maint).
Recent update to "git commit" broke amending an existing commit with bogus author/committer lines without a valid e-mail address. (merge c83a509 jk/commit-date-approxidate later to maint).
The lockfile API used to get confused which file to clean up when the process moved the $cwd after creating a lockfile. (merge fa137f6 nd/lockfile-absolute later to maint).
Traditionally we tried to avoid interpreting date strings given by the user as future dates, e.g. GIT_COMMITTER_DATE=2014-12-10 when used early November 2014 was taken as "October 12, 2014" because it is likely that a date in the future, December 10, is a mistake. This heuristics has been loosened to allow people to express future dates (most notably, --until= may want to be far in the future) and we no longer tiebreak by future-ness of the date when ISO-like format is used, and the string can make sense interpreted as both y-m-d and y-d-m. Git may still have to use the heuristics to tiebreak between dd/mm/yy and mm/dd/yy, though. (merge d372395 jk/approxidate-avoid-y-d-m-over-future-dates later to maint).
Git did not correctly read an overlong refname from a packed refs file. (merge ea41783 jk/read-packed-refs-without-path-max later to maint).
"git apply" was described in the documentation to take --ignore-date option, which it does not. (merge 0cef4e7 rw/apply-does-not-take-ignore-date later to maint).
"git add -i" did not notice when the interactive command input stream went away and kept asking the same question. (merge a8bec7a jk/add-i-read-error later to maint).
"git send-email" did not handle RFC 2047 encoded headers quite right. (merge ab47e2a rd/send-email-2047-fix later to maint).
New tag object format validation added in 2.2 showed garbage after a tagname it reported in its error message. (merge a1e920a js/fsck-tag-validation later to maint).
The code that reads the reflog from the newer to the older entries did not handle an entry that crosses a boundary of block it uses to read them correctly. (merge 69216bf jk/for-each-reflog-ent-reverse later to maint).
"git diff -B -M" after making a new copy B out of an existing file A and then editing A extensively ought to report that B was created by copying A and A was modified, which is what "git diff -C" reports, but it instead said A was renamed to B and A was edited heavily in place. This was not just incoherent but also failed to apply with "git apply". The report has been corrected to match what "git diff -C" produces for this case. (merge 6936b58 jc/diff-b-m later to maint).
In files we pre-populate for the user to edit with commented hints, a line of hint that is indented with a tab used to show as '#' (or any comment char), ' ' (space), and then the hint text that began with the tab, which some editors flag as an indentation error (tab following space). We now omit the space after the comment char in such a case. (merge d55aeb7 jc/strbuf-add-lines-avoid-sp-ht-sequence later to maint).
"git ls-tree" does not support path selection based on negative pathspecs, but did not error out when negative pathspecs are given. (merge f1f6224 nd/ls-tree-pathspec later to maint).
The function sometimes returned a non-freeable memory and some other times returned a piece of memory that must be freed, leading to inevitable leaks. (merge 59362e5 jc/exec-cmd-system-path-leak-fix later to maint).
The code to abbreviate an object name to its short unique prefix has been optimized when no abbreviation was requested. (merge 61e704e mh/find-uniq-abbrev later to maint).
"git add --ignore-errors ..." did not ignore an error to give a file that did not exist. (merge 1d31e5a mg/add-ignore-errors later to maint).
"git checkout $treeish $path", when $path in the index and the working tree already matched what is in $treeish at the $path, still overwrote the $path unnecessarily. (merge c5326bd jk/checkout-from-tree later to maint).
"git config --get-color" did not parse its command line arguments carefully. (merge cb35722 jk/colors-fix later to maint).
open() emulated on Windows platforms did not give EISDIR upon an attempt to open a directory for writing. (merge ba6fad0 js/windows-open-eisdir-error later to maint).
A few code paths used abs() when they should have used labs() on long integers. (merge 83915ba rs/maint-config-use-labs later to maint). (merge 31a8aa1 rs/receive-pack-use-labs later to maint).
"gitweb" used to depend on a behaviour recent CGI.pm deprecated. (merge 13dbf46 jk/gitweb-with-newer-cgi-multi-param later to maint).
"git init" (hence "git clone") initialized the per-repository configuration file .git/config with x-bit by mistake. (merge 1f32ecf mh/config-flip-xbit-back-after-checking later to maint).
Recent update in Git 2.2 started creating objects/info/packs and info/refs files with permission bits tighter than user's umask. (merge d91175b jk/prune-packed-server-info later to maint).
Git 2.0 was supposed to make the "simple" mode for the default of "git push", but it didn't. (merge 00a6fa0 jk/push-simple later to maint).
"Everyday" document had a broken link. (merge 366c8d4 po/everyday-doc later to maint).
A few test fixes. (merge 880ef58 jk/no-perl-tests later to maint).
The build procedure did not bother fixing perl and python scripts when NO_PERL and NO_PYTHON build-time configuration changed. (merge ca2051d jk/rebuild-perl-scripts-with-no-perl-seting-change later to maint).
The usage string of "git log" command was marked incorrectly for l10n. (merge e66dc0c km/log-usage-string-i18n later to maint).
"git for-each-ref" mishandled --format="%(upstream:track)" when a branch is marked to have forked from a non-existing branch. (merge b6160d9 rc/for-each-ref-tracking later to maint).

New in Git 2.3.0 RC 0 (Jan 13, 2015)

UPDATES SINCE V2.2:
Ports
Recent gcc toolchain on Cygwin started throwing compilation warning, which has been squelched.
UI, Workflows & Features:
It was cumbersome to use "GIT_SSH" mechanism when the user wanted to pass an extra set of arguments to the underlying ssh. A new environment variable GIT_SSH_COMMAND can be used for this.
A request to store an empty note via "git notes" meant to remove note from the object but with --allow-empty we will store a (surprise!) note that is empty.
"git interpret-trailers" learned to properly handle the "Conflicts:" block at the end.
"git am" learned "--message-id" option to copy the message ID of the incoming e-mail to the log message of resulting commit.
"git clone --reference=" learned the "--dissociate" option to go with it; it borrows objects from the reference object store while cloning only to reduce network traffic and then dissociates the resulting clone from the reference by performing local copies of borrowed objects.
"git send-email" learned "--transfer-encoding" option to force a non-fault Content-Transfer-Encoding header (e.g. base64).
"git send-email" normally identifies itself via X-Mailer: header in the message it sends out. A new command line flag --no-xmailer allows the user to squelch the header.
"git push" into a repository with a working tree normally refuses to modify the branch that is checked out. The command learned to optionally do an equivalent of "git reset --hard" only when there is no change to the working tree and the index instead, which would be useful to "deploy" by pushing into a repository.
"git new-workdir" (in contrib/) can be used to populate an empty and existing directory now.
Credential helpers are asked in turn until one of them give positive response, which is cumbersome to turn off when you need to run Git in an automated setting. The credential helper interface learned to allow a helper to say "stop, don't ask other helpers." Also GIT_TERMINAL_PROMPT environment can be set to false to disable our built-in prompt mechanism for passwords.
"git branch -d" (delete) and "git branch -m" (move) learned to honor "-f" (force) flag; unlike many other subcommands, the way to force these have been with separate "-D/-M" options, which was inconsistent.
"diff-highlight" filter (in contrib/) allows its color output to be customized via configuration variables.
"git imap-send" learned to take "-v" (verbose) and "-q" (quiet) command line options.
"git imap-send" now can be built to use cURL library to talk to IMAP servers (if the library is recent enough, of course). This allows you to use authenticate method other than CRAM-MD5, among other things.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc:
Earlier we made "rev-list --object-edge" more aggressively list the objects at the edge commits, in order to reduce number of objects　 fetched into a shallow repository, but the change affected cases other than "fetching into a shallow repository" and made it unusably slow (e.g. fetching into a normal repository should not have to suffer the overhead from extra processing). Limit it to a more specific case by introducing --objects-edge-aggressive, a new option to rev-list.
Squelched useless compiler warnings on Mac OS X regarding the crypto API.
The procedure to generate unicode table has been simplified.
Some filesystems assign filemodes in a strange way, fooling then automatic "filemode trustability" check done during a new repository creation. The initialization codepath has been hardened against this issue.
The codepath in "git remote update --prune" to drop many refs has been optimized.
The API into get_merge_bases*() family of functions was easy to misuse, which has been corrected to make it harder to do so.
Long overdue departure from the assumption that S_IFMT is shared by everybody made in 2005, which was necessary to port to z/OS.
"git push" and "git fetch" did not communicate an overlong refname correctly. Now it uses 64kB sideband to accommodate longer ones.
Recent GPG changes the keyring format and drops support for RFC1991 formatted signatures, breaking our existing tests.
"git-prompt" (in contrib/) used a variable from the global scope, possibly contaminating end-user's namespace.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.2:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.2 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).
The logic in "git bisect bad HEAD" etc. to avoid forcing the test of the common ancestor of bad and good commits was broken. (merge 07913d5 cc/bisect-rev-parsing later to maint).
"git checkout-index --temp=$target $path" did not work correctly for paths outside the current subdirectory in the project. (merge 74c4de5 es/checkout-index-temp later to maint).
The report from "git checkout" on a branch that builds on another local branch by setting its branch.*.merge to branch name (not a full refname) incorrectly said that the upstream is gone. (merge 05e7368 jc/checkout-local-track-report later to maint).
With The git-prompt support (in contrib/), using the exit status of the last command in the prompt, e.g. PS1='$(__git_ps1) $? ', did not work well, because the helper function stomped on the exit status. (merge eb443e3 tf/prompt-preserve-exit-status later to maint).
Recent update to "git commit" broke amending an existing commit with bogus author/committer lines without a valid e-mail address. (merge c83a509 jk/commit-date-approxidate later to maint).
The lockfile API used to get confused which file to clean up when the process moved the $cwd after creating a lockfile. (merge fa137f6 nd/lockfile-absolute later to maint).
Traditionally we tried to avoid interpreting date strings given by the user as future dates, e.g. GIT_COMMITTER_DATE=2014-12-10 when used early November 2014 was taken as "October 12, 2014" because it is likely that a date in the future, December 10, is a mistake. This heuristics has been loosened to allow people to express future dates (most notably, --until= may want to be far in the future) and we no longer tiebreak by future-ness of the date when ISO-like format is used, and the string can make sense interpreted as both y-m-d and y-d-m. Git may still have to use the heuristics to tiebreak between dd/mm/yy and mm/dd/yy, though. (merge d372395 jk/approxidate-avoid-y-d-m-over-future-dates later to maint).
Git did not correctly read an overlong refname from a packed refs file. (merge ea41783 jk/read-packed-refs-without-path-max later to maint).
"git apply" was described in the documentation to take --ignore-date option, which it does not. (merge 0cef4e7 rw/apply-does-not-take-ignore-date later to maint).
"git add -i" did not notice when the interactive command input stream went away and kept asking the same question. (merge a8bec7a jk/add-i-read-error later to maint).
"git send-email" did not handle RFC 2047 encoded headers quite right. (merge ab47e2a rd/send-email-2047-fix later to maint).
New tag object format validation added in 2.2 showed garbage after a tagname it reported in its error message. (merge a1e920a js/fsck-tag-validation later to maint).
The code that reads the reflog from the newer to the older entries did not handle an entry that crosses a boundary of block it uses to read them correctly. (merge 69216bf jk/for-each-reflog-ent-reverse later to maint).
"git diff -B -M" after making a new copy B out of an existing file A and then editing A extensively ought to report that B was created by copying A and A was modified, which is what "git diff -C" reports, but it instead said A was renamed to B and A was edited heavily in place. This was not just incoherent but also failed to apply with "git apply". The report has been corrected to match what "git diff -C" produces for this case. (merge 6936b58 jc/diff-b-m later to maint).
In files we pre-populate for the user to edit with commented hints, a line of hint that is indented with a tab used to show as '#' (or any comment char), ' ' (space), and then the hint text that began with the tab, which some editors flag as an indentation error (tab following space). We now omit the space after the comment char in such a case. (merge d55aeb7 jc/strbuf-add-lines-avoid-sp-ht-sequence later to maint).
"git ls-tree" does not support path selection based on negative pathspecs, but did not error out when negative pathspecs are given. (merge f1f6224 nd/ls-tree-pathspec later to maint).
The function sometimes returned a non-freeable memory and some other times returned a piece of memory that must be freed, leading to inevitable leaks. (merge 59362e5 jc/exec-cmd-system-path-leak-fix later to maint).
The code to abbreviate an object name to its short unique prefix has been optimized when no abbreviation was requested. (merge 61e704e mh/find-uniq-abbrev later to maint).
"git add --ignore-errors ..." did not ignore an error to give a file that did not exist. (merge 1d31e5a mg/add-ignore-errors later to maint).
"git checkout $treeish $path", when $path in the index and the working tree already matched what is in $treeish at the $path, still overwrote the $path unnecessarily. (merge c5326bd jk/checkout-from-tree later to maint).
"git config --get-color" did not parse its command line arguments carefully. (merge cb35722 jk/colors-fix later to maint).
open() emulated on Windows platforms did not give EISDIR upon an attempt to open a directory for writing. (merge ba6fad0 js/windows-open-eisdir-error later to maint).
A few code paths used abs() when they should have used labs() on long integers. (merge 83915ba rs/maint-config-use-labs later to maint). (merge 31a8aa1 rs/receive-pack-use-labs later to maint).
"gitweb" used to depend on a behaviour recent CGI.pm deprecated. (merge 13dbf46 jk/gitweb-with-newer-cgi-multi-param later to maint).
"git init" (hence "git clone") initialized the per-repository configuration file .git/config with x-bit by mistake. (merge 1f32ecf mh/config-flip-xbit-back-after-checking later to maint).
Git 2.0 was supposed to make the "simple" mode for the default of "git push", but it didn't. (merge 00a6fa0 jk/push-simple later to maint).
"Everyday" document had a broken link. (merge 366c8d4 po/everyday-doc later to maint).
A few test fixes. (merge 880ef58 jk/no-perl-tests later to maint).
The build procedure did not bother fixing perl and python scripts when NO_PERL and NO_PYTHON build-time configuration changed. (merge ca2051d jk/rebuild-perl-scripts-with-no-perl-seting-change later to maint).

New in Git 2.2.2 (Jan 13, 2015)

Fixes since v2.2.1:
"git checkout $treeish $path", when $path in the index and the working tree already matched what is in $treeish at the $path, still overwrote the $path unnecessarily.
"git config --get-color" did not parse its command line arguments carefully.
open() emulated on Windows platforms did not give EISDIR upon an attempt to open a directory for writing.
A few code paths used abs() when they should have used labs() on long integers.
"gitweb" used to depend on a behaviour recent CGI.pm deprecated.
"git init" (hence "git clone") initialized the per-repository configuration file .git/config with x-bit by mistake.
Git 2.0 was supposed to make the "simple" mode for the default of "git push", but it didn't.
"Everyday" document had a broken link.
The build procedure did not bother fixing perl and python scripts when NO_PERL and NO_PYTHON build-time configuration changed.
The code that reads the reflog from the newer to the older entries did not handle an entry that crosses a boundary of block it uses to read them correctly.
"git apply" was described in the documentation to take --ignore-date option, which it does not.
Traditionally we tried to avoid interpreting date strings given by the user as future dates, e.g. GIT_COMMITTER_DATE=2014-12-10 when used early November 2014 was taken as "October 12, 2014" because it is likely that a date in the future, December 10, is a mistake. This heuristics has been loosened to allow people to express future dates (most notably, --until= may want to be far in the future) and we no longer tiebreak by future-ness of the date when ISO-like format is used, and the string can make sense interpreted as both y-m-d and y-d-m. Git may still have to use the heuristics to tiebreak between dd/mm/yy
and mm/dd/yy, though.
The code to abbreviate an object name to its short unique prefix has been optimized when no abbreviation was requested.
"git add --ignore-errors ..." did not ignore an error to give a file that did not exist.
Git did not correctly read an overlong refname from a packed refs file.
Also contains typofixes, documentation updates and trivial code clean-ups.

New in Git 2.2.1 (Dec 19, 2014)

New in Git 2.2.0 (Nov 27, 2014)

UPDATES SINCE V2.1:
Ports:
Building on older MacOS X systems automatically sets the necessary NO_APPLE_COMMON_CRYPTO build-time option.
Building with NO_PTHREADS has been resurrected.
Compilation options have been updated a bit to better support the z/OS port.
UI, Workflows & Features:
"git archive" learned to filter what gets archived with a pathspec.
"git config --edit --global" starts from a skeletal per-user configuration file contents, instead of a total blank, when the user does not already have any global config. This immediately reduces the need to later ask "Have you forgotten to set core.user?", and we can add more to the template as we gain more experience.
"git stash list -p" used to be almost always a no-op because each stash entry is represented as a merge commit. It learned to show the difference between the base commit version and the working tree version, which is in line with what "git stash show" gives.
Sometimes users want to report a bug they experience on their repository, but they are not at liberty to share the contents of the repository. "fast-export" was taught an "--anonymize" option to replace blob contents, names of people, paths and log messages with bland and simple strings to help them.
"git difftool" learned an option to stop feeding paths to the diff backend when it exits with a non-zero status.
"git grep" learned to paint (or not paint) partial matches on context lines when showing "grep -C" output in color.
"log --date=iso" uses a slight variant of the ISO 8601 format that is more human readable. A new "--date=iso-strict" option gives datetime output that conforms more strictly.
The logic "git prune" uses is more resilient against various corner cases.
A broken reimplementation of Git could write an invalid index that records both stage #0 and higher-stage entries for the same path. We now notice and reject such an index, as there is no sensible fallback (we do not know if the broken tool wanted to resolve and forgot to remove the higher-stage entries, or if it wanted to unresolve and forgot to remove the stage #0 entry).
The temporary files "git mergetool" uses are renamed to avoid too many dots in them (e.g. a temporary file for "hello.c" used to be named e.g. "hello.BASE.4321.c" but now uses underscore instead, e.g. "hello_BASE_4321.c", to allow us to have multiple variants).
The temporary files "git mergetool" uses can be placed in a newly created temporary directory, instead of the current directory, by setting the mergetool.writeToTemp configuration variable.
"git mergetool" understands "--tool bc" now, as version 4 of BeyondCompare can be driven the same way as its version 3 and it feels awkward to say "--tool bc3" to run version 4.
The "pre-receive" and "post-receive" hooks are no longer required to consume their input fully (not following this requirement used to result in intermittent errors in "git push").
The pretty-format specifier "%d", which expands to " (tagname)" for a tagged commit, gained a cousin "%D" that just gives the "tagname" without frills.
"git push" learned "--signed" push, that allows a push (i.e. request to update the refs on the other side to point at a new history, together with the transmission of necessary objects) to be signed, so that it can be verified and audited, using the GPG signature of the person who pushed, that the tips of branches at a public repository really point the commits the pusher wanted to, without having to "trust" the server.
"git interpret-trailers" is a new filter to programmatically edit the tail end of the commit log messages, e.g. "Signed-off-by:".
"git help everyday" shows the "Everyday Git in 20 commands or so" document, whose contents have been updated to match more modern Git practice.
On the "git svn" front, work progresses to reduce memory consumption and to improve handling of mergeinfo.
Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support, etc:
The API to manipulate the "refs" has been restructured to make it more transactional, with the eventual goal to allow all-or-none atomic updates and migrating the storage to something other than the traditional filesystem based one (e.g. databases).
The lockfile API and its users have been cleaned up.
We no longer attempt to keep track of individual dependencies to the header files in the build procedure, relying instead on automated dependency generation support from modern compilers.
In tests, we have been using NOT_{MINGW,CYGWIN} test prerequisites long before negated prerequisites e.g. !MINGW were invented. The former has been converted to the latter to avoid confusion.
Optimized looking up a remote's configuration in a repository with very many remotes defined.
There are cases where you lock and open to write a file, close it to show the updated contents to an external processes, and then have to update the file again while still holding the lock; now the lockfile API has support for such an access pattern.
The API to allocate the structure to keep track of commit decoration has been updated to make it less cumbersome to use.
An in-core caching layer to let us avoid reading the same configuration files several times has been added. A few commands have been converted to use this subsystem.
Various code paths have been cleaned up and simplified by using the "strbuf", "starts_with()", and "skip_prefix()" APIs more.
A few codepaths that died when large blobs that would not fit in core are involved in their operation have been taught to punt instead, by e.g. marking a too-large blob as not to be diffed.
A few more code paths in "commit" and "checkout" have been taught to repopulate the cache-tree in the index, to help speed up later "write-tree" (used in "commit") and "diff-index --cached" (used in "status").
A common programming mistake to assign the same short option name to two separate options is detected by the parse_options() API to help developers.
The code path to write out the packed-refs file has been optimized, which especially matters in a repository with a large number of refs.
The check to see if a ref $F can be created by making sure no existing ref has $F/ as its prefix has been optimized, which especially matters in a repository with a large number of existing refs.
"git fsck" was taught to check the contents of tag objects a bit more.
"git hash-object" was taught a "--literally" option to help debugging.
When running a required clean filter, we do not have to mmap the original before feeding the filter. Instead, stream the file contents directly to the filter and process its output.
The scripts in the test suite can be run with the "-x" option to show a shell-trace of each command they run.
The "run-command" API learned to manage the argv and environment arrays for child process, alleviating the need for the callers to allocate and deallocate them.
Some people use AsciiDoctor, instead of AsciiDoc, to format our documentation set; the documentation has been adjusted to be usable by both, as AsciiDoctor is pickier than AsciiDoc about its input mark-up.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.1:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.1 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).
"git log --pretty/format=" with an empty format string did not mean the more obvious "No output whatsoever" but "Use default format", which was counterintuitive.
"git -c section.var command" and "git -c section.var= command" should pass the configuration value differently (the former should be a boolean true, the latter should be an empty string).
Applying a patch not generated by Git in a subdirectory used to check for whitespace breakage using the attributes of incorrect paths. Also whitespace checks were performed even for paths excluded via the "git apply --exclude=" mechanism.
"git bundle create" with a date-range specification was meant to exclude tags outside the range, but it didn't.
"git add x" where x used to be a directory and is now a symbolic link to a directory misbehaved.
The prompt script checked the $GIT_DIR/ref/stash file to see if there is a stash, which was a no-no.
Pack-protocol documentation had a minor typo.
"git checkout -m" did not switch to another branch while carrying the local changes forward when a path was deleted from the index.
"git daemon" (with NO_IPV6 build configuration) used to incorrectly use the hostname even when gethostbyname() reported that the given hostname is not found. (merge 107efbe rs/daemon-fixes later to maint).
With sufficiently long refnames, "git fast-import" could have overflowed an on-stack buffer.
After "pack-refs --prune" packed refs at the top-level, it failed to prune them.
Progress output from "git gc --auto" was visible in "git fetch -q".
We used to pass -1000 to poll(2), expecting it to also mean "no timeout", which should be spelled as -1.
"git rebase" documentation was unclear that it is required to specify on what the rebase is to be done when telling it to first check out . (merge 95c6826 so/rebase-doc later to maint).
"git push" over HTTP transport had an artificial limit on the number of refs that can be pushed, imposed by the command line length. (merge 26be19b jk/send-pack-many-refspecs later to maint).
When receiving an invalid pack stream that records the same object twice, multiple threads got confused due to a race. (merge ab791dd jk/index-pack-threading-races later to maint).
An attempt to remove the entire tree in the "git fast-import" input stream caused it to misbehave. (merge 2668d69 mb/fast-import-delete-root later to maint).
Reachability check (used in "git prune" and friends) did not add a detached HEAD as a starting point to traverse objects still in use. (merge c40fdd0 mk/reachable-protect-detached-head later to maint).
"git config --add section.var val" when section.var already has an empty-string value used to lose the empty-string value. (merge c1063be ta/config-add-to-empty-or-true-fix later to maint).
"git fsck" failed to report that it found corrupt objects via its exit status in some cases. (merge 30d1038 jk/fsck-exit-code-fix later to maint).
Use of the "--verbose" option used to break "git branch --merged". (merge 12994dd jk/maint-branch-verbose-merged later to maint).
Some MUAs mangle a line in a message that begins with "From " to ">From " when writing to a mailbox file, and feeding such an input to "git am" used to lose such a line. (merge 85de86a jk/mbox-from-line later to maint).
"rev-parse --verify --quiet $name" is meant to quietly exit with a non-zero status when $name is not a valid object name, but still gave error messages in some cases.
A handful of C source files have been updated to include "git-compat-util.h" as the first thing, to conform better to our coding guidelines. (merge 1c4b660 da/include-compat-util-first-in-c later to maint).
The t7004 test, which tried to run Git with small stack space, has been updated to use a bit larger stack to avoid false breakage on some platforms. (merge b9a1907 sk/tag-contains-wo-recursion later to maint).
A few documentation pages had example sections marked up not quite correctly, which passed AsciiDoc but failed with AsciiDoctor. (merge c30c43c bc/asciidoc-pretty-formats-fix later to maint). (merge f8a48af bc/asciidoc later to maint).
"gitweb" used deprecated CGI::startfrom, which was removed from CGI.pm as of 4.04; use CGI::start_from instead. (merge 4750f4b rm/gitweb-start-form later to maint).
Newer versions of 'meld' break the auto-detection we use to see if they are new enough to support the `--output` option. (merge b12d045 da/mergetool-meld later to maint).
"git pack-objects" forgot to disable the codepath to generate the object reachability bitmap when it needs to split the resulting pack. (merge 2113471 jk/pack-objects-no-bitmap-when-splitting later to maint).
The code to use cache-tree trusted the on-disk data too much and fell into an infinite loop upon seeing an incorrectly recorded index file. (merge 729dbbd jk/cache-tree-protect-from-broken-libgit2 later to maint).
"git fetch" into a repository where branch B was deleted earlier, back when it had reflog enabled, and then branch B/C is fetched into it without reflog enabled, which is arguably an unlikely corner case, unnecessarily failed. (merge aae828b jk/fetch-reflog-df-conflict later to maint).
"git log --first-parent -L..." used to crash. (merge a8787c5 tm/line-log-first-parent later to maint).

New in Git 2.2.0 RC 0 (Nov 1, 2014)

UPDATES SINCE V2.1
Ports:
Building on older MacOS X systems automatically sets the necessary NO_APPLE_COMMON_CRYPTO build-time option.
The support to build with NO_PTHREADS has been resurrected.
Compilation options has been updated a bit to support z/OS port better.
UI, Workflows & Features:
"git archive" learned to filter what gets archived with pathspec.
"git config --edit --global" starts from a skeletal per-user configuration file contents, instead of a total blank, when the user does not already have any. This immediately reduces the need for a later "Have you forgotten setting core.user?" and we can add more to the template as we gain more experience.
"git stash list -p" used to be almost always a no-op because each stash entry is represented as a merge commit. It learned to show the difference between the base commit version and the working tree version, which is in line with what "git show" gives.
Sometimes users want to report a bug they experience on their repository, but they are not at liberty to share the contents of the repository. "fast-export" was taught an "--anonymize" option to replace blob contents, names of people and paths and log messages with bland and simple strings to help them.
"git difftool" learned an option to stop feeding paths to the diff backend when it exits with a non-zero status.
"git grep" allows to paint (or not paint) partial matches on context lines whenshowing "grep -C" output in color.
"log --date=iso" uses a slight variant of ISO 8601 format that is made more human readable. A new "--date=iso-strict" option gives datetime output that is more strictly conformant.
The logic "git prune" uses is more resilient against various corner cases.
A broken reimplementation of Git could write an invalid index that records both stage #0 and higher stage entries for the same path. We now notice and reject such an index, as there is no sensible fallback (we do not know if the broken tool wanted to resolve and forgot to remove higher stage entries, or if it wanted to unresolve and forgot to remove the stage#0 entry).
The temporary files "git mergetool" uses are named to avoid too many dots in them (e.g. a temporary file for "hello.c" used to be named e.g. "hello.BASE.4321.c" but now uses underscore instead, e.g. "hello_BASE_4321.c").
The temporary files "git mergetools" uses can be placed in a newly creted temporary directory, instead of the current directory, by setting the mergetool.writeToTemp configuration variable.
"git mergetool" understands "--tool bc" now, as version 4 of BeyondCompare can be driven the same way as its version 3 and it feels awkward to say "--tool bc3".
The "pre-receive" and "post-receive" hooks are no longer required to consume their input fully (not following this requirement used to result in intermittent errors in "git push").
The pretty-format specifier "%d", which expanded to " (tagname)" for a tagged commit, gained a cousin "%D" that just gives the "tagname" without frills.
"git push" learned "--signed" push, that allows a push (i.e. request to update the refs on the other side to point at a new history, together with the transmission of necessary objects) to be signed, so that it can be verified and audited, using the GPG signature of the person who pushed, that the tips of branches at a public repository really point the commits the pusher wanted to, without having to "trust" the server.
"git interpret-trailers" is a new filter to programatically edit the tail end of the commit log messages.
"git help everyday" shows the "Everyday Git in 20 commands or so" document, whose contents have been updated to more modern Git practice.
On the "git svn" front, work to reduce memory consumption and to improve handling of mergeinfo progresses.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc:
The API to manipulate the "refs" has been restructured to make it more transactional, with the eventual goal to allow all-or-none atomic updates and migrating the storage to something other than the traditional filesystem based one (e.g. databases).
The lockfile API and its users have been cleaned up.
We no longer attempt to keep track of individual dependencies to the header files in the build procedure, relying on automated dependency generation support from modern compilers.
In tests, we have been using NOT_{MINGW,CYGWIN} test prerequisites long before negated prerequisites e.g. !MINGW were invented. The former has been converted to the latter to avoid confusion.
Looking up remotes configuration in a repository with very many remotes defined has been optimized.
There are cases where you lock and open to write a file, close it to show the updated contents to external processes, and then have to update the file again while still holding the lock, but the lockfile API lacked support for such an access pattern.
The API to allocate the structure to keep track of commit decoration has been updated to make it less cumbersome to use.
An in-core caching layer to let us avoid reading the same configuration files number of times has been added. A few commands have been converted to use this subsystem.
Various code paths have been cleaned up and simplified by using "strbuf", "starts_with()", and "skip_prefix()" APIs more.
A few codepaths that died when large blobs that would not fit in core are involved in their operation have been taught to punt instead, by e.g. marking too large a blob as not to be diffed.
A few more code paths in "commit" and "checkout" have been taught to repopulate the cache-tree in the index, to help speed up later "write-tree" (used in "commit") and "diff-index --cached" (used in "status").
A common programming mistake to assign the same short option name to two separate options is detected by parse_options() API to help developers.
The code path to write out the packed-refs file has been optimized, which especially matters in a repository with a large number of refs.
The check to see if a ref $F can be created by making sure no existing ref has $F/ as its prefix has been optimized, which especially matters in a repository with a large number of existing refs.
"git fsck" was taught to check contents of tag objects a bit more.
"git hash-object" was taught a "--literally" option to help debugging.
When running a required clean filter, we do not have to mmap the original before feeding the filter. Instead, stream the file contents directly to the filter and process its output.
The scripts in the test suite can be run with "-x" option to show a shell-trace of each command run in them.
The "run-command" API learned to manage the argv and environment array for child process, alleviating the need for the callers to allocate and deallocate them.
Some people use AsciiDoctor, instead of AsciiDoc, to format our documentation set; the documentation has been adjusted, as AsciiDoctor is pickier than AsciiDoc in its input mark-up.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.1:
"git log --pretty/format=" with an empty format string did not mean the more obvious "No output whatsoever" but "Use default format", which was counterintuitive.
"git -c section.var command" and "git -c section.var= command" should pass the configuration differently (the former should be a boolean true, the latter should be an empty string).
Applying a patch not generated by Git in a subdirectory used to check the whitespace breakage using the attributes for incorrect paths. Also whitespace checks were performed even for paths excluded via "git apply --exclude=" mechanism.
"git bundle create" with date-range specification were meant to exclude tags outside the range, but it didn't.
"git add x" where x that used to be a directory has become a symbolic link to a directory misbehaved.
The prompt script checked $GIT_DIR/ref/stash file to see if there is a stash, which was a no-no.
Pack-protocol documentation had a minor typo.
"git checkout -m" did not switch to another branch while carrying the local changes forward when a path was deleted from the index.
"git daemon" (with NO_IPV6 build configuration) used to incorrectly use the hostname even when gethostbyname() reported that the given hostname is not found. (merge 107efbe rs/daemon-fixes later to maint).
With sufficiently long refnames, "git fast-import" could have overflown an on-stack buffer.
After "pack-refs --prune" packed refs at the top-level, it failed to prune them.
Progress output from "git gc --auto" was visible in "git fetch -q".
We used to pass -1000 to poll(2), expecting it to also mean "no timeout", which should be spelled as -1.
"git rebase" documentation was unclear that it is required to specify on what the rebase is to be done when telling it to first check out . (merge 95c6826 so/rebase-doc later to maint).
"git push" over HTTP transport had an artificial limit on number of refs that can be pushed imposed by the command line length. (merge 26be19b jk/send-pack-many-refspecs later to maint).
When receiving an invalid pack stream that records the same object twice, multiple threads got confused due to a race. (merge ab791dd jk/index-pack-threading-races later to maint).
An attempt to remove the entire tree in the "git fast-import" input stream caused it to misbehave. (merge 2668d69 mb/fast-import-delete-root later to maint).
Reachability check (used in "git prune" and friends) did not add a detached HEAD as a starting point to traverse objects still in use. (merge c40fdd0 mk/reachable-protect-detached-head later to maint).
"git config --add section.var val" used to lose existing section.var whose value was an empty string. (merge c1063be ta/config-add-to-empty-or-true-fix later to maint).
"git fsck" failed to report that it found corrupt objects via its exit status in some cases. (merge 30d1038 jk/fsck-exit-code-fix later to maint).
Use of "--verbose" option used to break "git branch --merged". (merge 12994dd jk/maint-branch-verbose-merged later to maint).
Some MUAs mangled a line in a message that begins with "From " to ">From " when writing to a mailbox file and feeding such an input to "git am" used to lose such a line. (merge 85de86a jk/mbox-from-line later to maint).
"rev-parse --verify --quiet $name" is meant to quietly exit with a non-zero status when $name is not a valid object name, but still gave error messages in some cases.
A handful of C source files have been updated to include "git-compat-util.h" as the first thing, to conform better to our coding guidelines. (merge 1c4b660 da/include-compat-util-first-in-c later to maint).
t7004 test, which tried to run Git with small stack space, has been updated to give a bit larger stack to avoid false breakage on some platforms. (merge b9a1907 sk/tag-contains-wo-recursion later to maint).
A few documentation pages had example sections marked up not quite correctly, which passed AsciiDoc but failed with AsciiDoctor. (merge c30c43c bc/asciidoc-pretty-formats-fix later to maint). (merge f8a48af bc/asciidoc later to maint).
"gitweb" used deprecated CGI::startfrom, which was removed from CGI.pm as of 4.04; use CGI::start_from instead. (merge 4750f4b rm/gitweb-start-form later to maint).
Newer versions of 'meld' breaks the auto-detection we use to see if they are new enough to support the `--output` option. (merge b12d045 da/mergetool-meld later to maint).
"git pack-objects" forgot to disable the codepath to generate object recheability bitmap when it needs to split the resulting pack. (merge 2113471 jk/pack-objects-no-bitmap-when-splitting later to maint).

New in Git 2.1.3 (Oct 30, 2014)

New in Git 2.1.2 (Oct 1, 2014)

New in Git 2.1.1 (Sep 20, 2014)

New in Git 2.1.0 (Sep 1, 2014)

UPDATES SINCE V2.0:
UI, Workflows & Features:
Since the very beginning of Git, we gave the LESS environment a default value "FRSX" when we spawn "less" as the pager. "S" (chop long lines instead of wrapping) has been removed from this default set of options, because it is more or less a personal taste thing, as opposed to the others that have good justifications (i.e. "R" is very much justified because many kinds of output we produce are colored and "FX" is justified because output we produce is often shorter than a page).
The logic and data used to compute the display width needed for UTF-8 strings have been updated to match Unicode 7.0 better.
HTTP-based transports learned to better propagate the error messages from the webserver to the client coming over the HTTP transport.
The completion script for bash (in contrib/) has been updated to better handle aliases that define a complex sequence of commands.
The "core.preloadindex" configuration variable is enabled by default, allowing modern platforms to take advantage of their multiple cores.
"git clone" applies the "if cloning from a local disk, physically copy the repository using hardlinks, unless otherwise told not to with --no-local" optimization when the url.*.insteadOf mechanism rewrites a remote-repository "git clone $URL" into a clone from a local disk.
"git commit --date=" option learned more timestamp formats, including "--date=now".
The `core.commentChar` configuration variable is used to specify a custom comment character (other than the default "#") for the commit message editor. This can be set to `auto` to attempt to choose a different character that does not conflict with any that already starts a line in the message being edited, for cases like "git commit --amend".
"git format-patch" learned --signature-file= to add the contents of a file as a signature to the mail message it produces.
"git grep" learned the grep.fullname configuration variable to force "--full-name" to be the default. This may cause regressions for scripted users who do not expect this new behaviour.
"git imap-send" learned to ask the credential helper for auth material.
"git log" and friends now understand the value "auto" for the "log.decorate" configuration variable to enable the "--decorate" option automatically when the output is sent to tty.
"git merge" without an argument, even when there is an upstream defined for the current branch, refused to run until merge.defaultToUpstream is set to true. Flip the default of that configuration variable to true.
"git mergetool" learned to drive the vimdiff3 backend.
mergetool.prompt used to default to 'true', always asking "do you really want to run the tool on this path?". The default has been changed to 'false'. However, the prompt will still appear if mergetool used its autodetection system to guess which tool to use. Users who explicitly specify or configure a tool will no longer see the prompt by default. Strictly speaking, this is a backward incompatible change and users need to explicitly set the variable to 'true' if they want to be prompted to confirm running the tool on each path.
"git replace" learned the "--edit" subcommand to create a replacement by editing an existing object.
"git replace" learned a "--graft" option to rewrite the parents of a commit.
"git send-email" learned "--to-cover" and "--cc-cover" options, to tell it to copy To: and Cc: headers found in the first input file when emitting later input files.
"git svn" learned to cope with malformed timestamps with only one digit in the hour part, e.g. 2014-01-07T5:01:02.048176Z, emitted by some broken subversion server implementations.
"git tag" when editing the tag message shows the name of the tag being edited as a comment in the editor.
"git tag" learned to pay attention to "tag.sort" configuration, to be used as the default sort order when no --sort= option is given.
A new "git verify-commit" command, to check GPG signatures in signed commits, in a way similar to "git verify-tag" is used to check signed tags, was added.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.:
Build procedure for 'subtree' (in contrib/) has been cleaned up.
Support for the profile-feedback build, which has bit-rotted for quite a while, has been updated.
An experimental format to use two files (the base file and incremental changes relative to it) to represent the index has been introduced; this may reduce I/O cost of rewriting a large index when only small part of the working tree changes.
Effort to shrink the size of patches Windows folks maintain on top by upstreaming them continues. More tests that are not applicable to the Windows environment are identified and either skipped or made more portable.
Eradication of "test $condition -a $condition" from our scripts continues.
The `core.deltabasecachelimit` used to default to 16 MiB , but this proved to be too small, and has been bumped to 96 MiB.
"git blame" has been optimized greatly by reorganising the data structure that is used to keep track of the work to be done.
"git diff" that compares 3-or-more trees (e.g. parents and the result of a merge) has been optimized.
The API to update/delete references are being converted to handle updates to multiple references in a transactional way. As an example, "update-ref --stdin [-z]" has been updated to use this API.
skip_prefix() and strip_suffix() API functions are used a lot more widely throughout the codebase now.
Parts of the test scripts can be skipped by using a range notation, e.g. "sh t1234-test.sh --run='1-4 6 8-'" to omit test piece 5 and 7 and run everything else.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.0:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.0 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' notes for details).
We used to unconditionally disable the pager in the pager process we spawn to feed out output, but that prevented people who want to run "less" within "less" from doing so. (merge c0459ca je/pager-do-not-recurse later to maint).
Tools that read diagnostic output in our standard error stream do not want to see terminal control sequence (e.g. erase-to-eol). Detect them by checking if the standard error stream is connected to a tty. (merge 38de156 mn/sideband-no-ansi later to maint).
Mishandling of patterns in .gitignore that have trailing SPs quoted with backslashes (e.g. ones that end with "\ ") has been corrected. (merge 97c1364be6b pb/trim-trailing-spaces later to maint).
Reworded the error message given upon a failure to open an existing loose object file due to e.g. permission issues; it was reported as the object being corrupt, but that is not quite true. (merge d6c8a05 jk/report-fail-to-read-objects-better later to maint).
"git log -2master" is a common typo that shows two commits starting from whichever random branch that is not 'master' that happens to be checked out currently. (merge e3fa568 jc/revision-dash-count-parsing later to maint).
Code to avoid adding the same alternate object store twice was subtly broken for a long time, but nobody seems to have noticed. (merge 80b4785 rs/fix-alt-odb-path-comparison later to maint). (merge 539e750 ek/alt-odb-entry-fix later to maint).
The "%

New in Git 2.1.0 RC 1 (Aug 5, 2014)

UPDATES SINCE V2.0:
UI, Workflows & Features:
Since the very beginning of Git, we gave the LESS environment a default value "FRSX" when we spawn "less" as the pager. "S" (chop long lines instead of wrapping) has been removed from this default set of options, because it is more or less a personal taste thing, as opposed to others that have good justifications (i.e. "R" is very much justified because many kinds of output we produce are colored and "FX" is justified because output we produce is often shorter than a page).
The logic and data used to compute the display width needed for UTF-8 strings have been updated to match Unicode 7.0 better.
HTTP-based transports learned to propagate the error messages from the webserver better to the client coming over the HTTP transport.
The completion script for bash (in contrib/) has been updated to handle aliases that define complex sequence of commands better.
The "core.preloadindex" configuration variable is by default enabled, allowing modern platforms to take advantage of the multiple cores they have.
"git clone" applies the "if cloning from a local disk, physically copy repository using hardlinks, unless otherwise told not to with --no-local" optimization when url.*.insteadOf mechanism rewrites a "git clone $URL" that refers to a repository over the network to a clone from a local disk.
"git commit --date=" option learned to read from more timestamp formats, including "--date=now".
The `core.commentChar` configuration variable is used to specify a custom comment character other than the default "#" to be used in the commit log editor. This can be set to `auto` to attempt to choose a different character that does not conflict with what already starts a line in the message being edited for cases like "git commit --amend".
"git format-patch" learned --signature-file= to take the mail signature from.
"git grep" learned grep.fullname configuration variable to force "--full-name" to be default. This may cause regressions on scripted users that do not expect this new behaviour.
"git imap-send" learned to ask the credential helper for auth material.
"git log" and friends now understand the value "auto" set to the "log.decorate" configuration variable to enable the "--decorate" option automatically when the output is sent to tty.
"git merge" without argument, even when there is an upstream defined for the current branch, refused to run until merge.defaultToUpstream is set to true. Flip the default of that configuration variable to true.
"git mergetool" learned to drive the vimdiff3 backend.
mergetool.prompt used to default to 'true', always asking "do you really want to run the tool on this path?". Among the two purposes this prompt serves, ignore the use case to confirm that the user wants to view particular path with the named tool, and redefine the meaning of the prompt only to confirm the choice of the tool made by the autodetection (for those who configured the tool explicitly, the prompt shown for the latter purpose is simply annoying).
Strictly speaking, this is a backward incompatible change and the users need to explicitly set the variable to 'true' if they want to resurrect the now-ignored use case.
"git replace" learned the "--edit" subcommand to create a replacement by editing an existing object.
"git replace" learned a "--graft" option to rewrite parents of a commit.
"git send-email" learned "--to-cover" and "--cc-cover" options, to tell it to copy To: and Cc: headers found in the first input file when emitting later input files.
"git svn" learned to cope with malformed timestamps with only one digit in the hour part, e.g. 2014-01-07T5:01:02.048176Z, emitted by some broken subversion server implementations.
"git tag" when editing the tag message shows the name of the tag being edited as a comment in the editor.
"git tag" learned to pay attention to "tag.sort" configuration, to be used as the default sort order when no --sort= the option is given.
"git verify-commit" command to check GPG signature in signed commits, in a way similar to "git verify-tag" is used to check signed tags, was added.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.:
Build procedure for 'subtree' (in contrib/) has been cleaned up.
The support for the profile-feedback build, which has been left bit-rotten for quite a while, has been updated.
An experimental format to use two files (the base file and incremental changes relative to it) to represent the index has been introduced; this may reduce I/O cost of rewriting a large index when only small part of the working tree changes.
Effort to shrink the size of patches Windows folks maintain on top by upstreaming them continues. More tests that are not applicable to the Windows environment are identified and either skipped or made more portable.
Eradication of "test $condition -a $condition" from our scripts continues.
The leaf function to check validity of a refname format has been micro-optimized, using SSE2 instructions when available. A few breakages during its development have been caught and fixed already but there might remain some more still; please test and report if you find any.
The `core.deltabasecachelimit` used to default to 16 MiB , but this proved to be too small, and has been bumped to 96 MiB.
"git blame" has been optimized greatly by reorganising the data structure that is used to keep track of the work to be done.
"git diff" that compares 3-or-more trees (e.g. parents and the result of a merge) have been optimized.
The API to update/delete references are being converted to handle updates to multiple references in a transactional way. As an example, "update-ref --stdin [-z]" has been updated to use this API.
skip_prefix() and strip_suffix() API functions are used a lot more widely throughout the codebase now.
Parts of the test scripts can be skipped by using a range notation, e.g. "sh t1234-test.sh --run='1-4 6 8-'" to omit test piece 5 and 7 and run everything else.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V2.0:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.0 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' notes for details).
We used to unconditionally disable the pager in the pager process we spawn to feed out output, but that prevented people who want to run "less" within "less" from doing so. (merge c0459ca je/pager-do-not-recurse later to maint).
Tools that read diagnostic output in our standard error stream do not want to see terminal control sequence (e.g. erase-to-eol). Detect them by checking if the standard error stream is connected to a tty. (merge 38de156 mn/sideband-no-ansi later to maint).
Mishandling of patterns in .gitignore that has trailing SPs quoted with backslashes (e.g. ones that end with "\ ") have been corrected. (merge 97c1364be6b pb/trim-trailing-spaces later to maint).
Reworded the error message given upon a failure to open an existing loose object file due to e.g. permission issues; it was reported as the object being corrupt, but that is not quite true. (merge d6c8a05 jk/report-fail-to-read-objects-better later to maint).
"git log -2master" is a common typo that shows two commits starting from whichever random branch that is not 'master' that happens to be checked out currently. (merge e3fa568 jc/revision-dash-count-parsing later to maint).
Code to avoid adding the same alternate object store twice was subtly broken for a long time, but nobody seems to have noticed. (merge 80b4785 rs/fix-alt-odb-path-comparison later to maint). (merge 539e750 ek/alt-odb-entry-fix later to maint).
The "%

New in Git 2.0.4 (Jul 31, 2014)

New in Git 2.0.1 (Jul 3, 2014)

New in Git 2.0.0 (May 29, 2014)

BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY NOTES:
When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have used the traditional "matching" semantics so far (all your branches were sent to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name over there). In Git 2.0, the default is now the "simple" semantics, which pushes:
only the current branch to the branch with the same name, and only when the current branch is set to integrate with that remote branch, if you are pushing to the same remote as you fetch from; or
only the current branch to the branch with the same name, if you are pushing to a remote that is not where you usually fetch from.
You can use the configuration variable "push.default" to change this. If you are an old-timer who wants to keep using the "matching" semantics, you can set the variable to "matching", for example. Read the documentation for other possibilities.
When "git add -u" and "git add -A" are run inside a subdirectory without specifying which paths to add on the command line, they operate on the entire tree for consistency with "git commit -a" and other commands (these commands used to operate only on the current subdirectory). Say "git add -u ." or "git add -A ." if you want to limit the operation to the current directory.
"git add " is the same as "git add -A " now, so that "git add dir/" will notice paths you removed from the directory and record the removal. In older versions of Git, "git add " used to ignore removals. You can say "git add --ignore-removal " to
add only added or modified paths in , if you really want to.
The "-q" option to "git diff-files", which does *NOT* mean "quiet", has been removed (it told Git to ignore deletion, which you can do
with "git diff-files --diff-filter=d").
"git request-pull" lost a few "heuristics" that often led to mistakes.
The default prefix for "git svn" has changed in Git 2.0. For a long time, "git svn" created its remote-tracking branches directly under refs/remotes, but it now places them under refs/remotes/origin/ unless it is told otherwise with its "--prefix" option.
UPDATES SINCE V1.9 SERIES:
UI, Workflows & Features:
The "multi-mail" post-receive hook (in contrib/) has been updated to a more recent version from upstream.
The "remote-hg/bzr" remote-helper interfaces (used to be in contrib/) are no more. They are now maintained separately as third-party plug-ins in their own repositories.
"git gc --aggressive" learned "--depth" option and "gc.aggressiveDepth" configuration variable to allow use of a less insane depth than the built-in default value of 250.
"git log" learned the "--show-linear-break" option to show where a single strand-of-pearls is broken in its output.
The "rev-parse --parseopt" mechanism used by scripted Porcelains to parse command-line options and to give help text learned to take the argv-help (the placeholder string for an option parameter, e.g. "key-id" in "--gpg-sign=").
The pattern to find where the function begins in C/C++ used in "diff" and "grep -p" has been updated to improve viewing C++ sources.
"git rebase" learned to interpret a lone "-" as "@{-1}", the branch that we were previously on.
"git commit --cleanup=" learned a new mode, scissors.
"git tag --list" output can be sorted using "version sort" with "--sort=version:refname".
Discard the accumulated "heuristics" to guess from which branch the result wants to be pulled from and make sure that what the end user specified is not second-guessed by "git request-pull", to avoid mistakes. When you pushed out your 'master' branch to your public repository as 'for-linus', use the new "master:for-linus" syntax to denote the branch to be pulled.
"git grep" learned to behave in a way similar to native grep when "-h" (no header) and "-c" (count) options are given.
"git push" via transport-helper interface has been updated to allow forced ref updates in a way similar to the natively supported transports.
The "simple" mode is the default for "git push".
"git add -u" and "git add -A", when run without any pathspec, is a tree-wide operation even when run inside a subdirectory of a working tree.
"git add " is the same as "git add -A " now.
"core.statinfo" configuration variable, which is a never-advertised synonym to "core.checkstat", has been removed.
The "-q" option to "git diff-files", which does *NOT* mean "quiet", has been removed (it told Git to ignore deletion, which you can do with "git diff-files --diff-filter=d").
Server operators can loosen the "tips of refs only" restriction for the remote archive service with the uploadarchive.allowUnreachable configuration option.
The progress indicators from various time-consuming commands have been marked for i18n/l10n.
"git notes -C " diagnoses as an error an attempt to use an object that is not a blob.
"git config" learned to read from the standard input when "-" is given as the value to its "--file" parameter (attempting an operation to update the configuration in the standard input is rejected, of course).
Trailing whitespaces in .gitignore files, unless they are quoted for fnmatch(3), e.g. "path\ ", are warned and ignored. Strictly speaking, this is a backward-incompatible change, but very unlikely to bite any sane user and adjusting should be obvious and easy.
Many commands that create commits, e.g. "pull" and "rebase", learned to take the "--gpg-sign" option on the command line.
"git commit" can be told to always GPG sign the resulting commit by setting the "commit.gpgsign" configuration variable to "true" (the command-line option "--no-gpg-sign" should override it).
"git pull" can be told to only accept fast-forward by setting the new "pull.ff" configuration variable.
"git reset" learned the "-N" option, which does not reset the index fully for paths the index knows about but the tree-ish the command resets to does not (these paths are kept as intend-to-add entries).
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.:
The compilation options to port to AIX and to MSVC have been updated.
We started using wildmatch() in place of fnmatch(3) a few releases ago; complete the process and stop using fnmatch(3).
Uses of curl's "multi" interface and "easy" interface do not mix well when we attempt to reuse outgoing connections. Teach the RPC over HTTP code, used in the smart HTTP transport, not to use the "easy" interface.
The bitmap-index feature from JGit has been ported, which should significantly improve performance when serving objects from a repository that uses it.
The way "git log --cc" shows a combined diff against multiple parents has been optimized.
The prefixcmp() and suffixcmp() functions are gone. Use starts_with() and ends_with(), and also consider if skip_prefix() suits your needs better when using the former.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups. Many of them came from flurry of activities as GSoC candidate microproject exercises.
FIXES SINCE V1.9 SERIES:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.9 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).
"git p4" was broken in 1.9 release to deal with changes in binary files. (merge 749b668 cl/p4-use-diff-tree later to maint).
The shell prompt script (in contrib/), when using the PROMPT_COMMAND interface, used an unsafe construct when showing the branch name in $PS1. (merge 1e4119c8 rh/prompt-pcmode-avoid-eval-on-refname later to maint).
"git rebase" used a POSIX shell construct FreeBSD's /bin/sh does not work well with. (merge 8cd6596 km/avoid-non-function-return-in-rebase later to maint).
zsh prompt (in contrib/) leaked unnecessary error messages.
Bash completion (in contrib/) did not complete the refs and remotes correctly given "git pu" when "pu" is aliased to "push".
Some more Unicode code points, defined in Unicode 6.3 as having zero width, have been taught to our display column counting logic. (merge d813ab9 tb/unicode-6.3-zero-width later to maint).
Some tests used shell constructs that did not work well on FreeBSD (merge ff7a1c6 km/avoid-bs-in-shell-glob later to maint). (merge 00764ca km/avoid-cp-a later to maint).
"git update-ref --stdin" did not fail a request to create a ref when the ref already existed. (merge b9d56b5 mh/update-ref-batch-create-fix later to maint).
"git diff --no-index -Mq a b" fell into an infinite loop. (merge ad1c3fb jc/fix-diff-no-index-diff-opt-parse later to maint).
"git fetch --prune", when the right-hand side of multiple fetch refspecs overlap (e.g. storing "refs/heads/*" to "refs/remotes/origin/*", while storing "refs/frotz/*" to "refs/remotes/origin/fr/*"), aggressively thought that lack of "refs/heads/fr/otz" on the origin site meant we should remove "refs/remotes/origin/fr/otz" from us, without checking their "refs/frotz/otz" first.
Note that such a configuration is inherently unsafe (think what should happen when "refs/heads/fr/otz" does appear on the origin site), but that is not a reason not to be extra careful. (merge e6f6371 cn/fetch-prune-overlapping-destination later to maint).
"git status --porcelain --branch" showed its output with labels "ahead/behind/gone" translated to the user's locale. (merge 7a76c28 mm/status-porcelain-format-i18n-fix later to maint).
A stray environment variable $prefix could have leaked into and affected the behaviour of the "subtree" script (in contrib/).
When it is not necessary to edit a commit log message (e.g. "git commit -m" is given a message without specifying "-e"), we used to disable the spawning of the editor by overriding GIT_EDITOR, but this means all the uses of the editor, other than to edit the commit log message, are also affected. (merge b549be0 bp/commit-p-editor later to maint).
"git mv" that moves a submodule forgot to adjust the array that uses to keep track of which submodules were to be moved to update its configuration. (merge fb8a4e8 jk/mv-submodules-fix later to maint).
Length limit for the pathname used when removing a path in a deep subdirectory has been removed to avoid buffer overflows. (merge 2f29e0c mh/remove-subtree-long-pathname-fix later to maint).
The test helper lib-terminal always run an actual test_expect_* when included, which screwed up with the use of skil-all that may have to be done later. (merge 7e27173 jk/lib-terminal-lazy later to maint).
"git index-pack" used a wrong variable to name the keep-file in an error message when the file cannot be written or closed. (merge de983a0 nd/index-pack-error-message later to maint).
"rebase -i" produced a broken insn sheet when the title of a commit happened to contain '\n' (or ended with '\c') due to a careless use of 'echo'. (merge cb1aefd us/printf-not-echo later to maint).
There were a few instances of 'git-foo' remaining in the documentation that should have been spelled 'git foo'. (merge 3c3e6f5 rr/doc-merge-strategies later to maint).
Serving objects from a shallow repository needs to write a new file to hold the temporary shallow boundaries, but it was not cleaned when we exit due to die() or a signal. (merge 7839632 jk/shallow-update-fix later to maint).
When "git stash pop" stops after failing to apply the stash (e.g. due to conflicting changes), the stash is not dropped. State that explicitly in the output to let the users know. (merge 2d4c993 jc/stash-pop-not-popped later to maint).
The labels in "git status" output that describe the nature of conflicts (e.g. "both deleted") were limited to 20 bytes, which was too short for some l10n (e.g. fr). (merge c7cb333 jn/wt-status later to maint).
"git clean -d pathspec" did not use the given pathspec correctly and ended up cleaning too much. (merge 1f2e108 jk/clean-d-pathspec later to maint).
"git difftool" misbehaved when the repository is bound to the working tree with the ".git file" mechanism, where a textual file ".git" tells us where it is. (merge fcfec8b da/difftool-git-files later to maint).
"git push" did not pay attention to "branch.*.pushremote" if it is defined earlier than "remote.pushdefault"; the order of these two variables in the configuration file should not matter, but it did by mistake. (merge 98b406f jk/remote-pushremote-config-reading later to maint).
Code paths that parse timestamps in commit objects have been tightened. (merge f80d1f9 jk/commit-dates-parsing-fix later to maint).
"git diff --external-diff" incorrectly fed the submodule directory in the working tree to the external diff driver when it knew that it is the same as one of the versions being compared. (merge aba4727 tr/diff-submodule-no-reuse-worktree later to maint).
"git reset" needs to refresh the index when working in a working tree (it can also be used to match the index to the HEAD in an otherwise bare repository), but it failed to set up the working tree properly, causing GIT_WORK_TREE to be ignored. (merge b7756d4 nd/reset-setup-worktree later to maint).
"git check-attr" when working on a repository with a working tree did not work well when the working tree was specified via the "--work-tree" (and obviously with "--git-dir") option. (merge cdbf623 jc/check-attr-honor-working-tree later to maint).
"merge-recursive" was broken in 1.7.7 era and stopped working in an empty (temporary) working tree, when there are renames involved. This has been corrected. (merge 6e2068a bk/refresh-missing-ok-in-merge-recursive later to maint.)
"git rev-parse" was loose in rejecting command-line arguments that do not make sense, e.g. "--default" without the required value for that option. (merge a43219f ds/rev-parse-required-args later to maint.)
"include.path" variable (or any variable that expects a path that can use ~username expansion) in the configuration file is not a boolean, but the code failed to check it. (merge 67beb60 jk/config-path-include-fix later to maint.)
Commands that take pathspecs on the command line misbehaved when the pathspec is given as an absolute pathname (which is a practice not particularly encouraged) that points at a symbolic link in the working tree. (merge 6127ff6 mw/symlinks later to maint.)
"git diff --quiet -- pathspec1 pathspec2" sometimes did not return the correct status value. (merge f34b205 nd/diff-quiet-stat-dirty later to maint.)
Attempting to deepen a shallow repository by fetching over smart HTTP transport failed in the protocol exchange, when the no-done extension was used. The fetching side waited for the list of shallow boundary commits after the sending side stopped talking to it. (merge 0232852 nd/http-fetch-shallow-fix later to maint.)
Allow "git cmd path/", when the 'path' is where a submodule is bound to the top-level working tree, to match 'path', despite the extra and unnecessary trailing slash (such a slash is often given by command-line completion). (merge 2e70c01 nd/submodule-pathspec-ending-with-slash later to maint.)
Documentation and in-code comments had many instances of mistaken use of "nor", which have been corrected. (merge 235e8d5 jl/nor-or-nand-and later to maint).

New in Git 1.9.3 (May 12, 2014)

New in Git 1.9.2 (Apr 24, 2014)

Fixes since v1.9.1:
Documentation and in-code comments had many instances of mistaken use of "nor", which have been corrected.
"git fetch --prune", when the right-hand-side of multiple fetch refspecs overlap (e.g. storing "refs/heads/*" to "refs/remotes/origin/*", while storing "refs/frotz/*" to "refs/remotes/origin/fr/*"), aggressively thought that lack of "refs/heads/fr/otz" on the origin site meant we should remove "refs/remotes/origin/fr/otz" from us, without checking their "refs/frotz/otz" first.
Note that such a configuration is inherently unsafe (think what should happen when "refs/heads/fr/otz" does appear on the origin site), but that is not a reason not to be extra careful.
"git update-ref --stdin" did not fail a request to create a ref when the ref already existed.
"git diff --no-index -Mq a b" fell into an infinite loop.
When it is not necessary to edit a commit log message (e.g. "git commit -m" is given a message without specifying "-e"), we used to disable the spawning of the editor by overriding GIT_EDITOR, but this means all the uses of the editor, other than to edit the commit log message, are also affected.
"git status --porcelain --branch" showed its output with labels "ahead/behind/gone" translated to the user's locale.
"git mv" that moves a submodule forgot to adjust the array that uses to keep track of which submodules were to be moved to update its configuration.
Length limit for the pathname used when removing a path in a deep subdirectory has been removed to avoid buffer overflows.
The test helper lib-terminal always run an actual test_expect_* when included, which screwed up with the use of skil-all that may have to be done later.
"git index-pack" used a wrong variable to name the keep-file in an error message when the file cannot be written or closed.
"rebase -i" produced a broken insn sheet when the title of a commit happened to contain '\n' (or ended with '\c') due to a careless use of 'echo'.
There were a few instances of 'git-foo' remaining in the documentation that should have been spelled 'git foo'.
Serving objects from a shallow repository needs to write a new file to hold the temporary shallow boundaries but it was not cleaned when we exit due to die() or a signal.
When "git stash pop" stops after failing to apply the stash (e.g. due to conflicting changes), the stash is not dropped. State that explicitly in the output to let the users know.
The labels in "git status" output that describe the nature of conflicts (e.g. "both deleted") were limited to 20 bytes, which was too short for some l10n (e.g. fr).

New in Git 1.9.0 (Feb 15, 2014)

UPDATES SINCE V1.8.5:
Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports:
The HTTP transport, when talking GSS-Negotiate, uses "100 Continue" response to avoid having to rewind and resend a large payload, which may not be always doable.
Various bugfixes to remote-bzr and remote-hg (in contrib/).
The build procedure is aware of MirBSD now.
Various "git p4", "git svn" and "gitk" updates.
UI, Workflows & Features:
Fetching from a shallowly-cloned repository used to be forbidden, primarily because the codepaths involved were not carefully vetted and we did not bother supporting such usage. This release attempts to allow object transfer out of a shallowly-cloned repository in a more controlled way (i.e. the receiver becomes a shallow repository with a truncated history).
Just like we give a reasonable default for "less" via the LESS environment variable, we now specify a reasonable default for "lv" via the "LV" environment variable when spawning the pager.
Two-level configuration variable names in "branch.*" and "remote.*" hierarchies, whose variables are predominantly three-level, were not completed by hitting a in bash and zsh completions.
Fetching a 'frotz' branch with "git fetch", while a 'frotz/nitfol' remote-tracking branch from an earlier fetch was still there, would error out, primarily because the command was not told that it is allowed to lose any information on our side. "git fetch --prune" now can be used to remove 'frotz/nitfol' to make room for fetching and storing the 'frotz' remote-tracking branch.
"diff.orderfile=" configuration variable can be used to pretend as if the "-O" option were given from the command line of "git diff", etc.
The negative pathspec syntax allows "git log -- . ':!dir'" to tell us "I am interested in everything but 'dir' directory".
"git difftool" shows how many different paths there are in total, and how many of them have been shown so far, to indicate progress.
"git push origin master" used to push our 'master' branch to update the 'master' branch at the 'origin' repository. "gitweb" learned to treat ref hierarchies other than refs/heads as if they are additional branch namespaces (e.g. refs/changes/ in Gerrit).
"git for-each-ref --format=..." learned a few formatting directives; e.g. "%(color:red)%(HEAD)%(color:reset) %(refname:short) %(subject)".
The command string given to "git submodule foreach" is passed directly to the shell, without being eval'ed. This is a backward incompatible change that may break existing users.
"git log" and friends learned the "--exclude=" option, to allow people to say "list history of all branches except those that match this pattern" with "git log --exclude='*/*' --branches".
"git rev-parse --parseopt" learned a new "--stuck-long" option to help scripts parse options with an optional parameter.
The "--tags" option to "git fetch" no longer tells the command to fetch _only_ the tags. It instead fetches tags _in addition to_ what are fetched by the same command line without the option.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc:
When parsing a 40-hex string into the object name, the string is checked to see if it can be interpreted as a ref so that a warning can be given for ambiguity. The code kicked in even when the core.warnambiguousrefs is set to false to squelch this warning, in which case the cycles spent to look at the ref namespace were an expensive no-op, as the result was discarded without being used.
The naming convention of the packfiles has been updated; it used to be based on the enumeration of names of the objects that are contained in the pack, but now it also depends on how the packed result is represented---packing the same set of objects using different settings (or delta order) would produce a pack with different name.
"git diff --no-index" mode used to unnecessarily attempt to read the index when there is one.
The deprecated parse-options macro OPT_BOOLEAN has been removed; use OPT_BOOL or OPT_COUNTUP in new code.
A few duplicate implementations of prefix/suffix string comparison functions have been unified to starts_with() and ends_with().
The new PERLLIB_EXTRA makefile variable can be used to specify additional directories Perl modules (e.g. the ones necessary to run git-svn) are installed on the platform when building.
"git merge-base" learned the "--fork-point" mode, that implements the same logic used in "git pull --rebase" to find a suitable fork point out of the reflog entries for the remote-tracking branch the work has been based on. "git rebase" has the same logic that can be triggered with the "--fork-point" option.
A third-party "receive-pack" (the responder to "git push") can advertise the "no-thin" capability to tell "git push" not to use the thin-pack optimization. Our receive-pack has always been capable of accepting and fattening a thin-pack, and will continue not to ask "git push" to use a non-thin pack.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V1.8.5:
The pathspec matching code, while comparing two trees (e.g. "git diff A B -- path1 path2") was too aggressive and failed to match some paths when multiple pathspecs were involved.
"git repack --max-pack-size=8g" stopped being parsed correctly when the command was reimplemented in C.
An earlier update in v1.8.4.x to "git rev-list --objects" with negative ref had a performance regression. (merge 200abe7 jk/mark-edges-uninteresting later to maint).
A recent update to "git send-email" broke platforms where /etc/ssl/certs/ directory exists but cannot be used as SSL_ca_path (e.g. Fedora rawhide).
A handful of bugs around interpreting $branch@{upstream} notation and its lookalike, when $branch part has interesting characters, e.g. "@", and ":", have been fixed.
"git clone" would fail to clone from a repository that has a ref directly under "refs/", e.g. "refs/stash", because different validation paths do different things on such a refname. Loosen the client side's validation to allow such a ref.
"git log --left-right A...B" lost the "leftness" of commits reachable from A when A is a tag as a side effect of a recent bugfix. This is a regression in 1.8.4.x series.
documentations to "git pull" hinted there is an "-m" option because it incorrectly shared the documentation with "git merge".
"git diff A B submod" and "git diff A B submod/" ought to have done the same for a submodule "submod", but didn't.
"git clone $origin foo\bar\baz" on Windows failed to create the leading directories (i.e. a moral-equivalent of "mkdir -p").
"submodule.*.update=checkout", when propagated from .gitmodules to .git/config, turned into a "submodule.*.update=none", which did not make much sense. (merge efa8fd7 fp/submodule-checkout-mode later to maint).
The implementation of 'git stash $cmd "stash@{...}"' did not quote the stash argument properly and left it split at IFS whitespace.
The "--[no-]informative-errors" options to "git daemon" were parsed a bit too loosely, allowing any other string after these option names.
There is no reason to have a hardcoded upper limit for the number of parents of an octopus merge, created via the graft mechanism, but there was.
The basic test used to leave unnecessary trash directories in the t/ directory. (merge 738a8be jk/test-framework-updates later to maint).
"git merge-base --octopus" used to leave cleaning up suboptimal result to the caller, but now it does the clean-up itself.
A "gc" process running as a different user should be able to stop a new "gc" process from starting, but it didn't.
An earlier "clean-up" introduced an unnecessary memory leak.
"git add -A" (no other arguments) in a totally empty working tree used to emit an error.
"git log --decorate" did not handle a tag pointed by another tag nicely.
When we figure out how many file descriptors to allocate for keeping packfiles open, a system with non-working getrlimit() could cause us to die(), but because we make this call only to get a rough estimate of how many are available and we do not even attempt to use up all available file descriptors ourselves, it is nicer to fall back to a reasonable low value rather than dying.
read_sha1_file(), that is the workhorse to read the contents given an object name, honoured object replacements, but there was no corresponding mechanism to sha1_object_info() that was used to obtain the metainfo (e.g. type & size) about the object. This led callers to weird inconsistencies. (merge 663a856 cc/replace-object-info later to maint).
"git cat-file --batch=", an admittedly useless command, did not behave very well.
"git rev-parse -- " did not implement the usual disambiguation rules the commands in the "git log" family used in the same way.
"git mv A B/", when B does not exist as a directory, should error out, but it didn't.
A workaround to an old bug in glibc prior to glibc 2.17 has been retired; this would remove a side effect of the workaround that corrupts system error messages in non-C locales.
SSL-related options were not passed correctly to underlying socket layer in "git send-email".
"git commit -v" appends the patch to the log message before editing, and then removes the patch when the editor returned control. However, the patch was not stripped correctly when the first modified path was a submodule.
"git fetch --depth=0" was a no-op, and was silently ignored. Diagnose it as an error.
Remote repository URLs expressed in scp-style host:path notation are parsed more carefully (e.g. "foo/bar:baz" is local, "[::1]:/~user" asks to connect to user's home directory on host at address ::1.
"git diff -- ':(icase)makefile'" was unnecessarily rejected at the command line parser.
"git cat-file --batch-check=ok" did not check the existence of the named object.
"git am --abort" sometimes complained about not being able to write a tree with an 0{40} object in it.
Two processes creating loose objects at the same time could have failed unnecessarily when the name of their new objects started with the same byte value, due to a race condition.

New in Git 1.8.5.4 (Feb 6, 2014)

New in Git 1.9 RC 0 (Jan 18, 2014)

UPDATES SINCE V1.8.5:
Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports.
The HTTP transport, when talking GSS-Negotiate, uses "100 Continue" response to avoid having to rewind and resend a large payload, which may not be always doable.
Various bugfixes to remote-bzr and remote-hg (in contrib/).
The build procedure is aware of MirBSD now.
UI, Workflows & Features:
Fetching from a shallowly-cloned repository used to be forbidden, primarily because the codepaths involved were not carefully vetted and we did not bother supporting such usage. This release attempts to allow object transfer out of a shallowly-cloned repository in a more controlled way (i.e. the receiver become a shallow repository with a truncated history).
Just like we give a reasonable default for "less" via the LESS environment variable, we now specify a reasonable default for "lv" via the "LV" environment variable when spawning the pager.
Two-level configuration variable names in "branch.*" and "remote.*" hierarchies, whose variables are predominantly three-level, were not completed by hitting a in bash and zsh completions.
Fetching 'frotz' branch with "git fetch", while 'frotz/nitfol' remote-tracking branch from an earlier fetch was still there, would error out, primarily because the command was not told that it is allowed to lose any information on our side. "git fetch --prune" now can be used to remove 'frotz/nitfol' to make room to fetch and store 'frotz' remote-tracking branch.
"diff.orderfile=" configuration variable can be used to pretend as if the "-O" option were given from the command line of "git diff", etc.
The negative pathspec syntax allows "git log -- . ':!dir'" to tell us "I am interested in everything but 'dir' directory".
"git difftool" shows how many different paths there are in total, and how many of them have been shown so far, to indicate progress.
"git push origin master" used to push our 'master' branch to update the 'master' branch at the 'origin' repository. This has been enhanced to use the same ref mapping "git push origin" would use to determine what ref at the 'origin' to be updated with our 'master'. For example, with this configuration
[remote "origin"] push = refs/heads/*:refs/review/*
that would cause "git push origin" to push out our local branches to corresponding refs under refs/review/ hierarchy at 'origin', "git push origin master" would update 'refs/review/master' over there. Alternatively, if push.default is set to 'upstream' and our 'master' is set to integrate with 'topic' from the 'origin' branch, running "git push origin" while on our 'master' would update their 'topic' branch, and running "git push origin master" while on any of our branches does the same.
"gitweb" learned to treat ref hierarchies other than refs/heads as if they are additional branch namespaces (e.g. refs/changes/ in Gerrit).
"git for-each-ref --format=..." learned a few formatting directives; e.g. "%(color:red)%(HEAD)%(color:reset) %(refname:short) %(subject)".
The command string given to "git submodule foreach" is passed directly to the shell, without being eval'ed. This is a backward incompatible change that may break existing users.
"git log" and friends learned the "--exclude=" option, to allow people to say "list history of all branches except those that match this pattern" with "git log --exclude='*/*' --branches".
"git rev-parse --parseopt" learned a new "--stuck-long" option to help scripts parse options with an optional parameter.
The "--tags" option to "git fetch" no longer tells the command to fetch _only_ the tags. It instead fetches tags _in addition to_ what are fetched by the same command line without the option.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.:
When parsing a 40-hex string into the object name, the string is checked to see if it can be interpreted as a ref so that a warning can be given for ambiguity. The code kicked in even when the core.warnambiguousrefs is set to false to squelch this warning, in which case the cycles spent to look at the ref namespace were an expensive no-op, as the result was discarded without being used.
The naming convention of the packfiles has been updated; it used to be based on the enumeration of names of the objects that are contained in the pack, but now it also depends on how the packed result is represented---packing the same set of objects using different settings (or delta order) would produce a pack with different name.
"git diff --no-index" mode used to unnecessarily attempt to read the index when there is one.
The deprecated parse-options macro OPT_BOOLEAN has been removed; use OPT_BOOL or OPT_COUNTUP in new code.
A few duplicate implementations of prefix/suffix string comparison functions have been unified to starts_with() and ends_with().
The new PERLLIB_EXTRA makefile variable can be used to specify additional directories Perl modules (e.g. the ones necessary to run git-svn) are installed on the platform when building.
"git merge-base" learned the "--fork-point" mode, that implements the same logic used in "git pull --rebase" to find a suitable fork point out of the reflog entries for the remote-tracking branch the work has been based on. "git rebase" has the same logic that can be triggered with the "--fork-point" option.
A third-party "receive-pack" (the responder to "git push") can advertise the "no-thin" capability to tell "git push" not to use the thin-pack optimization. Our receive-pack has always been capable of accepting and fattening a thin-pack, and will continue not to ask "git push" to use a non-thin pack.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V1.8.5:
"submodule.*.update=checkout", when propagated from .gitmodules to .git/config, turned into a "submodule.*.update=none", which did not make much sense. (merge efa8fd7 fp/submodule-checkout-mode later to maint).
The implementation of 'git stash $cmd "stash@{...}"' did not quote the stash argument properly and left it split at IFS whitespace. (merge 2a07e43 ow/stash-with-ifs later to maint).
The "--[no-]informative-errors" options to "git daemon" were parsed a bit too loosely, allowing any other string after these option names. (merge 82246b7 nd/daemon-informative-errors-typofix later to maint).
There is no reason to have a hardcoded upper limit of the number of parents for an octopus merge, created via the graft mechanism, but there was. (merge e228c17 js/lift-parent-count-limit later to maint).
The basic test used to leave unnecessary trash directories in the t/ directory. (merge 738a8be jk/test-framework-updates later to maint).
"git merge-base --octopus" used to leave cleaning up suboptimal result to the caller, but now it does the clean-up itself. (merge 8f29299 bm/merge-base-octopus-dedup later to maint).
A "gc" process running as a different user should be able to stop a new "gc" process from starting, but it didn't. (merge ed7eda8 km/gc-eperm later to maint).
An earlier "clean-up" introduced an unnecessary memory leak. (merge e1c1a32 jk/credential-plug-leak later to maint).
"git add -A" (no other arguments) in a totally empty working tree used to emit an error. (merge 64ed07c nd/add-empty-fix later to maint).
"git log --decorate" did not handle a tag pointed by another tag nicely. (merge 5e1361c bc/log-decoration later to maint).
When we figure out how many file descriptors to allocate for keeping packfiles open, a system with non-working getrlimit() could cause us to die(), but because we make this call only to get a rough estimate of how many is available and we do not even attempt to use up all file descriptors available ourselves, it is nicer to fall back to a reasonable low value rather than dying. (merge 491a8de jh/rlimit-nofile-fallback later to maint).
read_sha1_file(), that is the workhorse to read the contents given an object name, honoured object replacements, but there was no corresponding mechanism to sha1_object_info() that was used to obtain the metainfo (e.g. type & size) about the object. This led callers to weird inconsistencies. (merge 663a856 cc/replace-object-info later to maint).
"git cat-file --batch=", an admittedly useless command, did not behave very well. (merge 6554dfa jk/cat-file-regression-fix later to maint).
"git rev-parse -- " did not implement the usual disambiguation rules the commands in the "git log" family used in the same way. (merge 62f162f jk/rev-parse-double-dashes later to maint).
"git mv A B/", when B does not exist as a directory, should error out, but it didn't. (merge c57f628 mm/mv-file-to-no-such-dir-with-slash later to maint).
A workaround to an old bug in glibc prior to glibc 2.17 has been retired; this would remove a side effect of the workaround that corrupts system error messages in non-C locales.
SSL-related options were not passed correctly to underlying socket layer in "git send-email". (merge 5508f3e tr/send-email-ssl later to maint).
"git commit -v" appends the patch to the log message before editing, and then removes the patch when the editor returned control. However, the patch was not stripped correctly when the first modified path was a submodule. (merge 1a72cfd jl/commit-v-strip-marker later to maint).
"git fetch --depth=0" was a no-op, and was silently ignored. Diagnose it as an error. (merge 5594bca nd/transport-positive-depth-only later to maint).
Remote repository URL expressed in scp-style host:path notation are parsed more carefully (e.g. "foo/bar:baz" is local, "[::1]:/~user" asks to connect to user's home directory on host at address ::1. (merge a2036d7 tb/clone-ssh-with-colon-for-port later to maint).
"git diff -- ':(icase)makefile'" was unnecessarily rejected at the command line parser. (merge 887c6c1 nd/magic-pathspec later to maint).
"git cat-file --batch-check=ok" did not check the existence of the named object. (merge 4ef8d1d sb/sha1-loose-object-info-check-existence later to maint).
"git am --abort" sometimes complained about not being able to write a tree with an 0{40} object in it. (merge 77b43ca jk/two-way-merge-corner-case-fix later to maint).
Two processes creating loose objects at the same time could have failed unnecessarily when the name of their new objects started with the same byte value, due to a race condition. (merge b2476a6 jh/loose-object-dirs-creation-race later to maint).

New in Git 1.8.5.3 (Jan 15, 2014)

New in Git 1.8.5.2 (Dec 18, 2013)

New in Git 1.8.5.1 (Dec 4, 2013)

New in Git 1.8.5 (Nov 28, 2013)

UPDATES SINCE V1.8.4:
Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports:
"git-svn" has been taught to use the serf library, which is the only option SVN 1.8.0 offers us when talking the HTTP protocol.
"git-svn" talking over an https:// connection using the serf library dumped core due to a bug in the serf library that SVN uses. Work around it on our side, even though the SVN side is being fixed.
On MacOS X, we detected if the filesystem needs the "pre-composed unicode strings" workaround, but did not automatically enable it. Now we do.
remote-hg remote helper misbehaved when interacting with a local Hg repository relative to the home directory, e.g. "clone hg::~/there".
imap-send ported to OS X uses Apple's security framework instead of OpenSSL's.
"git fast-import" treats an empty path given to "ls" as the root of the tree.
UI, Workflows & Features:
xdg-open can be used as a browser backend for "git web-browse" (hence to show "git help -w" output), when available.
"git grep" and "git show" pay attention to the "--textconv" option when these commands are told to operate on blob objects (e.g. "git grep -e pattern --textconv HEAD:Makefile").
"git replace" helper no longer allows an object to be replaced with another object of a different type to avoid confusion (you can still manually craft such a replacement using "git update-ref", as an escape hatch).
"git status" no longer prints the dirty status information of submodules for which submodule.$name.ignore is set to "all".
"git rebase -i" honours core.abbrev when preparing the insn sheet for editing.
"git status" during a cherry-pick shows which original commit is being picked.
Instead of typing four capital letters "HEAD", you can say "@" now, e.g. "git log @".
"git check-ignore" follows the same rule as "git add" and "git status" in that the ignore/exclude mechanism does not take effect on paths that are already tracked. With the "--no-index" option, it can be used to diagnose which paths that should have been ignored have been mistakenly added to the index.
Some irrelevant "advice" messages that are shared with "git status" output have been removed from the commit log template.
"update-refs" learned a "--stdin" option to read multiple update requests and perform them in an all-or-none fashion.
Just like "make -C ", "git -C ..." tells Git to go there before doing anything else.
Just like "git checkout -" knows to check out, and "git merge -" knows to merge, the branch you were previously on, "git cherry-pick" now understands "git cherry-pick -" to pick from the previous branch.
"git status" now omits the prefix to make its output a comment in a commit log editor, which is not necessary for human consumption. Scripts that parse the output of "git status" are advised to use "git status --porcelain" instead, as its format is stable and easier to parse.
The ref syntax "foo^{tag}" (with the literal string "{tag}") peels a tag ref to itself, i.e. it's a no-op., and fails if "foo" is not a tag. "git rev-parse --verify v1.0^{tag}" is a more convenient way than "test $(git cat-file -t v1.0) = tag" to check if v1.0 is a tag.
"git branch -v -v" (and "git status") did not distinguish among a branch that is not based on any other branch, a branch that is in sync with its upstream branch, and a branch that is configured with an upstream branch that no longer exists.
Earlier we started rejecting any attempt to add the 0{40} object name to the index and to tree objects, but it sometimes is necessary to allow this to be able to use tools like filter-branch to correct such broken tree objects. "filter-branch" can again be used to do this.
"git config" did not provide a way to set or access numbers larger than a native "int" on the platform; it now provides 64-bit signed integers on all platforms.
"git pull --rebase" always chose to do the bog-standard flattening rebase. You can tell it to run "rebase --preserve-merges" with "git pull --rebase=preserve" or by setting "pull.rebase" configuration to "preserve".
"git push --no-thin" actually disables the "thin pack transfer" optimization.
Magic pathspecs like ":(icase)makefile" (matches both Makefile and makefile) and ":(glob)foo/**/bar" (matches "bar" in "foo" and any subdirectory of "foo") can be used in more places.
The "http.*" variables can now be specified for individual URLs. For example,
[http] sslVerify = true [http "https://weak.example.com/"] sslVerify = false
would flip http.sslVerify off only when talking to that specific site.
"git mv A B" when moving a submodule has been taught to relocate the submodule's working tree and to adjust the paths in the .gitmodules file.
"git blame" can now take more than one -L option to discover the origin of multiple blocks of lines.
The http transport clients can optionally ask to save cookies with the http.savecookies configuration variable.
"git push" learned a more fine grained control over a blunt "--force" when requesting a non-fast-forward update with the "--force-with-lease=:" option.
"git diff --diff-filter=" can now take lowercase letters (e.g. "--diff-filter=d") to mean "show everything but these classes". "git diff-files -q" is now a deprecated synonym for "git diff-files --diff-filter=d".
"git fetch" (hence "git pull" as well) learned to check "fetch.prune" and "remote.*.prune" configuration variables and to behave as if the "--prune" command line option was given.
"git check-ignore -z" applied the NUL termination to both its input (with --stdin) and its output, but "git check-attr -z" ignored the option on the output side. Make both honor -z on the input and output side the same way.
"git whatchanged" may still be used by old timers, but mention of it in documents meant for new users will only waste readers' time wondering what the difference is between it and "git log". Make it less prominent in the general part of the documentation and explain that it is merely a "git log" with different default behaviour in its own document.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc:
"git for-each-ref" when asking for merely the object name does not have to parse the object pointed at by the refs; the codepath has been optimized.
The HTTP transport will try to use TCP keepalive when able.
"git repack" is now written in C.
Build procedure for MSVC has been updated.
If a build-time fallback is set to "cat" instead of "less", we should apply the same "no subprocess or pipe" optimization as we apply to user-supplied GIT_PAGER=cat.
Many commands use a --dashed-option as an operation mode selector (e.g. "git tag --delete") that excludes other operation modes (e.g. "git tag --delete --verify" is nonsense) and that cannot be negated (e.g. "git tag --no-delete" is nonsense). The parse-options API learned a new OPT_CMDMODE macro to make it easier to implement such a set of options.
OPT_BOOLEAN() in the parse-options API was misdesigned to be "counting up" but many subcommands expect it to behave as "on/off". Update them to use OPT_BOOL() which is a proper boolean.
"git gc" exits early without doing any work when it detects that another instance of itself is already running.
Under memory pressure and/or file descriptor pressure, we used to close pack windows that are not used and also closed filehandles to open but unused packfiles. These are now controlled separately to better cope with the load.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes since v1.8.4:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.4 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases' notes for details).
An ancient How-To on serving Git repositories on an HTTP server lacked a warning that it has been mostly superseded with a more modern way. (merge 6d52bc3 sc/doc-howto-dumb-http later to maint).
The interaction between the use of Perl in our test suite and NO_PERL has been clarified a bit. (merge f8fc0ee jn/test-prereq-perl-doc later to maint).
The synopsis section of the "git unpack-objects" documentation has been clarified a bit. (merge 61e2e22 vd/doc-unpack-objects later to maint).
We did not generate the HTML version of the documentation to "git subtree" in contrib/. (merge 95c62fb jk/subtree-install-fix later to maint).
A fast-import stream expresses a pathname with funny characters by quoting them in C style; the remote-hg remote helper forgot to unquote such a path. (merge 1136265 ap/remote-hg-unquote-cquote later to maint).
"git reset -p HEAD" has a codepath to special-case it to behave differently from resetting to contents of other commits, but a recent change broke it.
Coloring around octopus merges in "log --graph" output was screwy. (merge 339c17b hn/log-graph-color-octopus later to maint).
"git checkout topic", when there is not yet a local "topic" branch but there is a unique remote-tracking branch for a remote "topic" branch, pretended as if "git checkout -t -b topic remote/$r/topic" (for that unique remote $r) was run. This hack however was not implemented for "git checkout topic --". (merge bca3969 mm/checkout-auto-track-fix later to maint).
One long-standing flaw in the pack transfer protocol used by "git clone" was that there was no way to tell the other end which branch "HEAD" points at, and the receiving end needed to guess. A new capability has been defined in the pack protocol to convey this information so that cloning from a repository with more than one branch pointing at the same commit where the HEAD is at now reliably sets the initial branch in the resulting repository. (merge 360a326 jc/upload-pack-send-symref later to maint).
We did not handle cases where the http transport gets redirected during the authorization request (e.g. from http:// to https://). (merge 70900ed jk/http-auth-redirects later to maint).
Bash prompting code to deal with an SVN remote as an upstream was coded in a way unsupported by older Bash versions (3.x). (merge 52ec889 sg/prompt-svn-remote-fix later to maint).
The fall-back parsing of commit objects with broken author or committer lines was less robust than ideal in picking up the timestamps. (merge 03818a4 jk/split-broken-ident later to maint).
"git rev-list --objects ^v1.0^ v1.0" gave the v1.0 tag itself in the output, but "git rev-list --objects v1.0^..v1.0" did not. (merge 895c5ba jc/revision-range-unpeel later to maint).
"git clone" wrote some progress messages to standard output, not to standard error, and did not suppress them with the --no-progress option. (merge 643f918 jk/clone-progress-to-stderr later to maint).
"format-patch --from=" forgot to omit an unnecessary in-body from line, i.e. when is the same as the real author. (merge 662cc30 jk/format-patch-from later to maint).
"git shortlog" used to choke and die when there is a malformed commit (e.g. missing authors); it now simply ignores such a commit and keeps going. (merge cd4f09e jk/shortlog-tolerate-broken-commit later to maint).
"git merge-recursive" did not parse its "--diff-algorithm=" command line option correctly. (merge 6562928 jk/diff-algo later to maint).
When running "fetch -q", a long silence while the sender side computes the set of objects to send can be mistaken by proxies as dropped connection. The server side has been taught to send a small empty messages to keep the connection alive. (merge 115dedd jk/upload-pack-keepalive later to maint).
"git rebase" had a portability regression in v1.8.4 that triggered a bug in some BSD shell implementations. (merge 99855dd mm/rebase-continue-freebsd-WB later to maint).
"git branch --track" had a minor regression in v1.8.3.2 and later that made it impossible to base your local work on anything but a local branch of the upstream repository you are tracking. (merge b0f49ff jh/checkout-auto-tracking later to maint).
When the web server responds with "405 Method Not Allowed", "git http-backend" should tell the client what methods are allowed with the "Allow" header. (merge 9247be0 bc/http-backend-allow-405 later to maint).
When there is no sufficient overlap between old and new history during a "git fetch" into a shallow repository, objects that the sending side knows the receiving end has were unnecessarily sent. (merge f21d2a7 nd/fetch-into-shallow later to maint).
"git cvsserver" computed the permission mode bits incorrectly for executable files. (merge 1b48d56 jc/cvsserver-perm-bit-fix later to maint).
When send-email obtains an error message to die with upon failure to start an SSL session, it tried to read the error string from a wrong place. (merge 6cb0c88 bc/send-email-ssl-die-message-fix later to maint).
The implementation of "add -i" has some crippling code to work around an ActiveState Perl limitation but it by mistake also triggered on Git for Windows where MSYS perl is used. (merge df17e77 js/add-i-mingw later to maint).
We made sure that we notice when the user-supplied GIT_DIR is actually a gitfile, but did not do the same when the default ".git" is a gitfile. (merge 487a2b7 nd/git-dir-pointing-at-gitfile later to maint).
When an object is not found after checking the packfiles and the loose object directory, read_sha1_file() re-checks the packfiles to prevent racing with a concurrent repacker; teach the same logic to has_sha1_file(). (merge 45e8a74 jk/has-sha1-file-retry-packed later to maint).
"git commit --author=$name", when $name is not in the canonical "A. U. Thor " format, looks for a matching name from existing history, but did not consult mailmap to grab the preferred author name. (merge ea16794 ap/commit-author-mailmap later to maint).
"git ls-files -k" needs to crawl only the part of the working tree that may overlap the paths in the index to find killed files, but shared code with the logic to find all the untracked files, which made it unnecessarily inefficient. (merge 680be04 jc/ls-files-killed-optim later to maint).
The shortened commit object names in the insn sheet that is prepared at the beginning of a "rebase -i" session can become ambiguous as the rebasing progresses and the repository gains more commits. Make sure the internal record is kept with full 40-hex object names. (merge 75c6976 es/rebase-i-no-abbrev later to maint).
"git rebase --preserve-merges" internally used the merge machinery and as a side effect left the merge summary message in the log, but when rebasing there is no need for the merge summary. (merge a9f739c rt/rebase-p-no-merge-summary later to maint).
A call to xread() was used without a loop around it to cope with short reads in the codepath to stream new contents to a pack. (merge e92527c js/xread-in-full later to maint).
"git rebase -i" forgot that the comment character is configurable while reading its insn sheet. (merge 7bca7af es/rebase-i-respect-core-commentchar later to maint).
The mailmap support code read past the allocated buffer when the mailmap file ended with an incomplete line. (merge f972a16 jk/mailmap-incomplete-line later to maint).
We used to send a large request to read(2)/write(2) as a single system call, which was bad from the latency point of view when the operation needs to be killed, and also triggered an error on broken 64-bit systems that refuse to read or write more than 2GB in one go. (merge a487916 sp/clip-read-write-to-8mb later to maint).
"git fetch" that auto-followed tags incorrectly reused the connection with Git-aware transport helper (like the sample "ext::" helper shipped with Git). (merge 0f73f8b jc/transport-do-not-use-connect-twice-in-fetch later to maint).
"git log --full-diff -- " showed a huge diff for paths outside the given for each commit, instead of showing the change relative to the parent of the commit. "git reflog -p" had a similar problem. (merge 838f9a1 tr/log-full-diff-keep-true-parents later to maint).
Setting a submodule.*.path configuration variable to true (without giving "= value") caused Git to segfault. (merge 4b05440 jl/some-submodule-config-are-not-boolean later to maint).
"git rebase -i" (there could be others, as the root cause is pretty generic) fed a random, data dependent string to 'echo' and expected it to come out literally, corrupting its error message. (merge 89b0230 mm/no-shell-escape-in-die-message later to maint).
Some people still use rather old versions of bash, which cannot grok some constructs like 'printf -v varname' which the prompt and completion code started to use recently. (merge a44aa69 bc/completion-for-bash-3.0 later to maint).
Code to read configuration from a blob object did not compile on platforms with fgetc() etc. implemented as macros. (merge 49d6cfa hv/config-from-blob later to maint-1.8.3).
The recent "short-cut clone connectivity check" topic broke a shallow repository when a fetch operation tries to auto-follow tags. (merge 6da8bdc nd/fetch-pack-shallow-fix later to maint-1.8.3).

New in Git 1.8.4.3 (Nov 9, 2013)

Fixes since v1.8.4.2:
The interaction between use of Perl in our test suite and NO_PERL has been clarified a bit.
A fast-import stream expresses a pathname with funny characters by quoting them in C style; remote-hg remote helper (in contrib/) forgot to unquote such a path.
One long-standing flaw in the pack transfer protocol used by "git clone" was that there was no way to tell the other end which branch "HEAD" points at, and the receiving end needed to guess. A new capability has been defined in the pack protocol to convey this information so that cloning from a repository with more than one branches pointing at the same commit where the HEAD is at now reliably sets the initial branch in the resulting repository.
We did not handle cases where http transport gets redirected during the authorization request (e.g. from http:// to https://).
"git rev-list --objects ^v1.0^ v1.0" gave v1.0 tag itself in the output, but "git rev-list --objects v1.0^..v1.0" did not.
The fall-back parsing of commit objects with broken author or committer lines were less robust than ideal in picking up the timestamps.
Bash prompting code to deal with an SVN remote as an upstream were coded in a way not supported by older Bash versions (3.x).
"git checkout topic", when there is not yet a local "topic" branch but there is a unique remote-tracking branch for a remote "topic" branch, pretended as if "git checkout -t -b topic remote/$r/topic" (for that unique remote $r) was run. This hack however was not implemented for "git checkout topic --".
Coloring around octopus merges in "log --graph" output was screwy.
We did not generate HTML version of documentation to "git subtree" in contrib/.
The synopsis section of "git unpack-objects" documentation has been clarified a bit.
An ancient How-To on serving Git repositories on an HTTP server lacked a warning that it has been mostly superseded with more modern way.
Also contains a handful of trivial code clean-ups, documentation updates, updates to the test suite, etc.

New in Git 1.8.5 RC 0 (Oct 31, 2013)

UPDATES SINCE V1.8.4:
Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports:
"git-svn" used with SVN 1.8.0 when talking over https:// connection dumped core due to a bug in the serf library that SVN uses. Work it around on our side, even though the SVN side is being fixed.
On MacOS X, we detected if the filesystem needs the "pre-composed unicode strings" workaround, but did not automatically enable it. Now we do.
remote-hg remote helper misbehaved when interacting with a local Hg repository relative to the home directory, e.g. "clone hg::~/there".
imap-send ported to OS X uses Apple's security framework instead of OpenSSL one.
Subversion 1.8.0 that was recently released breaks older subversion clients coming over http/https in various ways.
"git fast-import" treats an empty path given to "ls" as the root of the tree.
UI, Workflows & Features:
"git grep" and "git show" pays attention to "--textconv" option when these commands are told to operate on blob objects (e.g. "git grep -e pattern HEAD:Makefile").
"git replace" helper no longer allows an object to be replaced with another object of a different type to avoid confusion (you can still manually craft such replacement using "git update-ref", as an escape hatch).
"git status" no longer prints dirty status information for submodules for which submodule.$name.ignore is set to "all".
"git rebase -i" honours core.abbrev when preparing the insn sheet for editing.
"git status" during a cherry-pick shows what original commit is being picked.
Instead of typing four capital letters "HEAD", you can say "@" now, e.g. "git log @".
"git check-ignore" follows the same rule as "git add" and "git status" in that the ignore/exclude mechanism does not take effect on paths that are already tracked. With "--no-index" option, it can be used to diagnose which paths that should have been ignored have been mistakenly added to the index.
Some irrelevant "advice" messages that are shared with "git status" output have been removed from the commit log template.
"update-refs" learnt a "--stdin" option to read multiple update requests and perform them in an all-or-none fashion.
Just like "make -C ", "git -C ..." tells Git to go there before doing anything else.
Just like "git checkout -" knows to check out and "git merge -" knows to merge the branch you were previously on, "git cherry-pick" now understands "git cherry-pick -" to pick from the previous branch.
"git status" now omits the prefix to make its output a comment in a commit log editor, which is not necessary for human consumption. Scripts that parse the output of "git status" are advised to use "git status --porcelain" instead, as its format is stable and easier to parse.
Make "foo^{tag}" to peel a tag to itself, i.e. no-op., and fail if "foo" is not a tag. "git rev-parse --verify v1.0^{tag}" would be a more convenient way to say "test $(git cat-file -t v1.0) = tag".
"git branch -v -v" (and "git status") did not distinguish among a branch that does not build on any other branch, a branch that is in sync with the branch it builds on, and a branch that is configured to build on some other branch that no longer exists.
A packfile that stores the same object more than once is broken and will be rejected by "git index-pack" that is run when receiving data over the wire.
Earlier we started rejecting an attempt to add 0{40} object name to the index and to tree objects, but it sometimes is necessary to allow so to be able to use tools like filter-branch to correct such broken tree objects. "filter-branch" can again be used to to do so.
"git config" did not provide a way to set or access numbers larger than a native "int" on the platform; it now provides 64-bit signed integers on all platforms.
"git pull --rebase" always chose to do the bog-standard flattening rebase. You can tell it to run "rebase --preserve-merges" by setting "pull.rebase" configuration to "preserve".
"git push --no-thin" actually disables the "thin pack transfer" optimization.
Magic pathspecs like ":(icase)makefile" that matches both Makefile and makefile can be used in more places.
The "http.*" variables can now be specified per URL that the configuration applies. For example,
[http] sslVerify = true [http "https://weak.example.com/"] sslVerify = false
would flip http.sslVerify off only when talking to that specified site.
"git mv A B" when moving a submodule A has been taught to relocate its working tree and to adjust the paths in the .gitmodules file.
"git blame" can now take more than one -L option to discover the origin of multiple blocks of the lines.
The http transport clients can optionally ask to save cookies with http.savecookies configuration variable.
"git push" learned a more fine grained control over a blunt "--force" when requesting a non-fast-forward update with the "--force-with-lease=:" option.
"git diff --diff-filter=" can now take lowercase letters (e.g. "--diff-filter=d") to mean "show everything but these classes". "git diff-files -q" is now a deprecated synonym for "git diff-files --diff-filter=d".
"git fetch" (hence "git pull" as well) learned to check "fetch.prune" and "remote.*.prune" configuration variables and to behave as if the "--prune" command line option was given.
"git check-ignore -z" applied the NUL termination to both its input (with --stdin) and its output, but "git check-attr -z" ignored the option on the output side. Make both honor -z on the input and output side the same way.
"git whatchanged" may still be used by old timers, but mention of it in documents meant for new users will only waste readers' time wonderig what the difference is between it and "git log". Make it less prominent in the general part of the documentation and explain that it is merely a "git log" with different default behaviour in its own document.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc:
The HTTP transport will try to use TCP keepalive when able.
"git repack" is now written in C.
Build procedure for MSVC has been updated.
If a build-time fallback is set to "cat" instead of "less", we should apply the same "no subprocess or pipe" optimization as we apply to user-supplied GIT_PAGER=cat.
Many commands use --dashed-option as a operation mode selector (e.g. "git tag --delete") that the user can use at most one (e.g. "git tag --delete --verify" is a nonsense) and you cannot negate (e.g. "git tag --no-delete" is a nonsense). parse-options API learned a new OPT_CMDMODE macro to make it easier to implement such a set of options.
OPT_BOOLEAN() in parse-options API was misdesigned to be "counting up" but many subcommands expect it to behave as "on/off". Update them to use OPT_BOOL() which is a proper boolean.
"git gc" exits early without doing a double-work when it detects that another instance of itself is already running.
Under memory pressure and/or file descriptor pressure, we used to close pack windows that are not used and also closed filehandle to an open but unused packfiles. These are now controlled separately to better cope with the load.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V1.8.4:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.4 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for details).
Coloring around octopus merges in "log --graph" output was screwy. (merge 339c17b hn/log-graph-color-octopus later to maint).
"git checkout topic", when there is not yet a local "topic" branch but there is a unique remote-tracking branch for a remote "topic" branch, pretended as if "git checkout -t -b topic remote/$r/topic" (for that unique remote $r) was run. This hack however was not implemented for "git checkout topic --". (merge bca3969 mm/checkout-auto-track-fix later to maint).
One long-standing flaw in the pack transfer protocol used by "git clone" was that there was no way to tell the other end which branch "HEAD" points at, and the receiving end needed to guess. A new capability has been defined in the pack protocol to convey this information so that cloning from a repository with more than one branches pointing at the same commit where the HEAD is at now reliably sets the initial branch in the resulting repository. (merge 360a326 jc/upload-pack-send-symref later to maint).
We did not handle cases where http transport gets redirected during the authorization request (e.g. from http:// to https://). (merge 70900ed jk/http-auth-redirects later to maint).
Bash prompting code to deal with an SVN remote as an upstream were coded in a way not supported by older Bash versions (3.x). (merge 52ec889 sg/prompt-svn-remote-fix later to maint).
The fall-back parsing of commit objects with broken author or committer lines were less robust than ideal in picking up the timestamps. (merge 03818a4 jk/split-broken-ident later to maint).
"git rev-list --objects ^v1.0^ v1.0" gave v1.0 tag itself in the output, but "git rev-list --objects v1.0^..v1.0" did not. (merge 895c5ba jc/revision-range-unpeel later to maint).
"git clone" gave some progress messages to the standard output, not to the standard error, and did not allow suppressing them with the --no-progress option. (merge 643f918 jk/clone-progress-to-stderr later to maint).
"format-patch --from=" forgot to omit unnecessary in-body from line, i.e. when is the same as the real author. (merge 662cc30 jk/format-patch-from later to maint).
"git shortlog" used to choke and die when there is a malformed commit (e.g. missing authors); it now simply ignore such a commit and keeps going. (merge cd4f09e jk/shortlog-tolerate-broken-commit later to maint).
"git merge-recursive" did not parse its "--diff-algorithm=" command line option correctly. (merge 6562928 jk/diff-algo later to maint).
When running "fetch -q", a long silence while the sender side computes the set of objects to send can be mistaken by proxies as dropped connection. The server side has been taught to send a small empty messages to keep the connection alive. (merge 115dedd jk/upload-pack-keepalive later to maint).
"git rebase" had a portability regression in v1.8.4 to trigger a bug in some BSD shell implementations. (merge 99855dd mm/rebase-continue-freebsd-WB later to maint).
"git branch --track" had a minor regression in v1.8.3.2 and later that made it impossible to base your local work on anything but a local branch of the upstream repository you are tracking from. (merge b0f49ff jh/checkout-auto-tracking later to maint).
When the webserver responds with "405 Method Not Allowed", "git http-backend" should tell the client what methods are allowed with the "Allow" header. (merge 9247be0 bc/http-backend-allow-405 later to maint).
When there is no sufficient overlap between old and new history during a "git fetch" into a shallow repository, objects that the sending side knows the receiving end has were unnecessarily sent. (merge f21d2a7 nd/fetch-into-shallow later to maint).
"git cvsserver" computed the permission mode bits incorrectly for executable files. (merge 1b48d56 jc/cvsserver-perm-bit-fix later to maint).
When send-email comes up with an error message to die with upon failure to start an SSL session, it tried to read the error string from a wrong place. (merge 6cb0c88 bc/send-email-ssl-die-message-fix later to maint).
The implementation of "add -i" has a crippling code to work around ActiveState Perl limitation but it by mistake also triggered on Git for Windows where MSYS perl is used. (merge df17e77 js/add-i-mingw later to maint).
We made sure that we notice the user-supplied GIT_DIR is actually a gitfile, but did not do the same when the default ".git" is a gitfile. (merge 487a2b7 nd/git-dir-pointing-at-gitfile later to maint).
When an object is not found after checking the packfiles and then loose object directory, read_sha1_file() re-checks the packfiles to prevent racing with a concurrent repacker; teach the same logic to has_sha1_file(). (merge 45e8a74 jk/has-sha1-file-retry-packed later to maint).
"git commit --author=$name", when $name is not in the canonical "A. U. Thor " format, looks for a matching name from existing history, but did not consult mailmap to grab the preferred author name. (merge ea16794 ap/commit-author-mailmap later to maint).
"git ls-files -k" needs to crawl only the part of the working tree that may overlap the paths in the index to find killed files, but shared code with the logic to find all the untracked files, which made it unnecessarily inefficient. (merge 680be04 jc/ls-files-killed-optim later to maint).
The commit object names in the insn sheet that was prepared at the beginning of "rebase -i" session can become ambiguous as the rebasing progresses and the repository gains more commits. Make sure the internal record is kept with full 40-hex object names. (merge 75c6976 es/rebase-i-no-abbrev later to maint).
"git rebase --preserve-merges" internally used the merge machinery and as a side effect, left merge summary message in the log, but when rebasing, there should not be a need for merge summary. (merge a9f739c rt/rebase-p-no-merge-summary later to maint).
A call to xread() was used without a loop around to cope with short read in the codepath to stream new contents to a pack. (merge e92527c js/xread-in-full later to maint).
"git rebase -i" forgot that the comment character can be configurable while reading its insn sheet. (merge 7bca7af es/rebase-i-respect-core-commentchar later to maint).
The mailmap support code read past the allocated buffer when the mailmap file ended with an incomplete line. (merge f972a16 jk/mailmap-incomplete-line later to maint).
We used to send a large request to read(2)/write(2) as a single system call, which was bad from the latency point of view when the operation needs to be killed, and also triggered an error on broken 64-bit systems that refuse to take more than 2GB read or write in one go. (merge a487916 sp/clip-read-write-to-8mb later to maint).
"git fetch" that auto-followed tags incorrectly reused the connection with Git-aware transport helper (like the sample "ext::" helper shipped with Git). (merge 0f73f8b jc/transport-do-not-use-connect-twice-in-fetch later to maint).
"git log --full-diff -- " showed a huge diff for paths outside the given for each commit, instead of showing the change relative to the parent of the commit. "git reflog -p" had a similar problem. (merge 838f9a1 tr/log-full-diff-keep-true-parents later to maint).
Setting submodule.*.path configuration variable to true (without giving "= value") caused Git to segfault. (merge 4b05440 jl/some-submodule-config-are-not-boolean later to maint).
"git rebase -i" (there could be others, as the root cause is pretty generic) fed a random, data dependeant string to 'echo' and expects it to come out literally, corrupting its error message. (merge 89b0230 mm/no-shell-escape-in-die-message later to maint).
Some people still use rather old versions of bash, which cannot grok some constructs like 'printf -v varname' the prompt and completion code started to use recently. (merge a44aa69 bc/completion-for-bash-3.0 later to maint).
Code to read configuration from a blob object did not compile on platforms with fgetc() etc. implemented as macros. (merge 49d6cfa hv/config-from-blob later to maint-1.8.3).
The recent "short-cut clone connectivity check" topic broke a shallow repository when a fetch operation tries to auto-follow tags. (merge 6da8bdc nd/fetch-pack-shallow-fix later to maint-1.8.3).

New in Git 1.8.4.2 (Oct 29, 2013)

Fixes since v1.8.4.1:
"git clone" gave some progress messages to the standard output, not to the standard error, and did not allow suppressing them with the "--no-progress" option.
"format-patch --from=" forgot to omit unnecessary in-body from line, i.e. when is the same as the real author.
"git shortlog" used to choke and die when there is a malformed commit (e.g. missing authors); it now simply ignore such a commit and keeps going.
"git merge-recursive" did not parse its "--diff-algorithm=" command line option correctly.
"git branch --track" had a minor regression in v1.8.3.2 and later that made it impossible to base your local work on anything but a local branch of the upstream repository you are tracking from.
"git ls-files -k" needs to crawl only the part of the working tree that may overlap the paths in the index to find killed files, but shared code with the logic to find all the untracked files, which made it unnecessarily inefficient.
When there is no sufficient overlap between old and new history during a "git fetch" into a shallow repository, objects that the sending side knows the receiving end has were unnecessarily sent.
When running "fetch -q", a long silence while the sender side computes the set of objects to send can be mistaken by proxies as dropped connection. The server side has been taught to send a small empty messages to keep the connection alive.
When the webserver responds with "405 Method Not Allowed", "git http-backend" should tell the client what methods are allowed with the "Allow" header.
"git cvsserver" computed the permission mode bits incorrectly for executable files.
The implementation of "add -i" has a crippling code to work around ActiveState Perl limitation but it by mistake also triggered on Git for Windows where MSYS perl is used.
We made sure that we notice the user-supplied GIT_DIR is actually a gitfile, but did not do the same when the default ".git" is a gitfile.
When an object is not found after checking the packfiles and then loose object directory, read_sha1_file() re-checks the packfiles to prevent racing with a concurrent repacker; teach the same logic to has_sha1_file().
"git commit --author=$name", when $name is not in the canonical "A. U. Thor " format, looks for a matching name from existing history, but did not consult mailmap to grab the preferred author name.
The commit object names in the insn sheet that was prepared at the beginning of "rebase -i" session can become ambiguous as the rebasing progresses and the repository gains more commits. Make sure the internal record is kept with full 40-hex object names.
"git rebase --preserve-merges" internally used the merge machinery and as a side effect, left merge summary message in the log, but when rebasing, there should not be a need for merge summary.
"git rebase -i" forgot that the comment character can be configurable while reading its insn sheet.
Also contains a handful of trivial code clean-ups, documentation updates, updates to the test suite, etc.

New in Git 1.8.4.1 (Oct 3, 2013)

New in Git 1.8.4 RC 0 (Jul 25, 2013)

Updates since v1.8.3:
Foreign interfaces, subsystems and ports.
Cygwin port has been updated for more recent Cygwin 1.7.
"git rebase -i" now honors --strategy and -X options.
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.
With "export" remote-helper protocol, (1) a push that tries to update a remote ref whose name is different from the pushing side 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.
git-remote-mw (in contrib/) adds a command to allow previewing the contents locally before pushing it out, when working with a MediaWiki remote.
UI, Workflows & Features:
Sample "post-receive-email" hook script got an enhanced replacement "multimail" (in contrib/).
Also in contrib/ is a new "contacts" script that runs "git blame" to find out the people who may be interested in a set of changes.
"git clean" command learned an interactive mode.
The "--head" option to "git show-ref" was only to add "HEAD" to the list of candidate refs to be filtered by the usual rules (e.g. "--heads" that only show refs under refs/heads). The meaning of the option has been changed to always show "HEAD" regardless of what filtering will be applied to any other ref.
This is a backward incompatible change and might cause breakages to people's existing scripts.
"git show -s" was less discoverable than it should have been. It now has a natural synonym "git show --no-patch".
"git check-mailmap" is a new command that lets you map usernames and e-mail addresses through the mailmap mechanism, just like many built-in commands do.
"git name-rev" learned to name an annotated tag object back to its tagname; "git name-rev $(git rev-parse v1.0.0)" gives "tags/v1.0.0", for example.
"git cat-file --batch-check=" is added, primarily to allow on-disk footprint of objects in packfiles (often they are a lot smaller than their true size, when expressed as deltas) to be reported.
"git rebase [-i]" used to leave just "rebase" as its reflog messages for some operations. They have been reworded to be more informative.
In addition to the choice from "rebase, merge, or checkout-detach", "submodule update" can allow a custom command to be used in to update the working tree of submodules via the "submodule.*.update" configuration variable.
"git submodule update" can optionally clone the submodule repositories shallowly.
"git format-patch" learned "--from[=whom]" option, which sets the "From: " header to the specified person (or the person who runs the command, if "=whom" part is missing) and move the original author information to an in-body From: header as necessary.
The configuration variable "merge.ff" was cleary a tri-state to choose one from "favor fast-forward when possible", "always create a merge even when the history could fast-forward" and "do not create any merge, only update when the history fast-forwards", but the command line parser did not implement the usual convention of "last one wins, and command line overrides the configuration" correctly.
"gitweb" learned to optionally place extra links that point at the levels higher than the Gitweb pages themselves in the breadcrumbs, so that it can be used as part of a larger installation.
"git log --format=" now honors i18n.logoutputencoding configuration variable.
The "push.default=simple" mode of "git push" has been updated to behave like "current" without requiring a remote tracking information, when you push to a remote that is different from where you fetch from (i.e. a triangular workflow).
Having multiple "fixup!" on a line in the rebase instruction sheet did not work very well with "git rebase -i --autosquash".
"git log" learned the "--author-date-order" option, with which the output is topologically sorted and commits in parallel histories are shown intermixed together based on the author timestamp.
Various subcommands of "git submodule" refused to run from anywhere other than the top of the working tree of the superproject, but they have been taught to let you run from a subdirectory.
"git diff" learned a mode that ignores hunks whose change consists only of additions and removals of blank lines, which is the same as "diff -B" (ignore blank lines) of GNU diff.
"git rm" gives a single message followed by list of paths to report multiple paths that cannot be removed.
"git rebase" can be told with ":/look for this string" syntax commits to replay the changes onto and where the work to be replayed begins.
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".
On Cygwin, "cygstart" is now recognised as a possible way to start a web browser (used in "help -w" and "instaweb" among others).
"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 ", when happens to be a 40-hex string, directly uses the 40-hex string as an object name, even if a ref "refs//" exists. This disambiguation order is unlikely to change, but we should warn about the ambiguity just like we warn when more than one refs/ hierarchies 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). This introduced a corner case breakage to "git am --abort" but it has been fixed.
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.
"git describe" learned "--first-parent" option to limit its closest tagged commit search to the first-parent chain.
"git merge foo" that might have meant "git merge origin/foo" is diagnosed with a more informative error message.
"git log -L,:" has been added. This may still have leaks and rough edges, though.
We used the approxidate() parser for "--expire=" options of various commands, but it is better to treat --expire=all and --expire=now a bit more specially than using the current timestamp. "git gc" and "git reflog" have been updated with a new parsing function for expiry dates.
Updates to completion (both bash and zsh) helpers.
The behaviour of the "--chain-reply-to" option of "git send-email" have changed at 1.7.0, and we added a warning/advice message to help users adjust to the new behaviour back then, but we kept it around for too long. The message has finally been removed.
"git fetch origin master" unlike "git fetch origin" or "git fetch" did not update "refs/remotes/origin/master"; this was an early design decision to keep the update of remote tracking branches predictable, but in practice it turns out that people find it more convenient to opportunistically update them whenever we have a chance, and we have been updating them when we run "git push" which already breaks the original "predictability" anyway.
The configuration variable core.checkstat was advertised in the documentation but the code expected core.statinfo instead. For now, we accept both core.checkstat and core.statinfo, but the latter will be removed in the longer term.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc:
The function attributes extensions are used to catch mistakes in use of our own variadic functions that use NULL sentinel at the end (i.e. like execl(3)) and format strings (i.e. like printf(3)).
The code to allow configuration data to be read from in-tree blob objects is in. This may help working in a bare repository and submodule updates.
Fetching between repositories with many refs employed O(n^2) algorithm to match up the common objects, which has been corrected.
The original way to specify remote repository using .git/branches/ used to have a nifty feature. The code to support the feature was still in a function but the caller was changed not to call it 5 years ago, breaking that feature and leaving the supporting code unreachable. The dead code has been removed.
"git pack-refs" that races with new ref creation or deletion have been susceptible to lossage of refs under right conditions, which has been tightened up.
We read loose and packed rerferences in two steps, but after deciding to read a loose ref but before actually opening it to read it, another process racing with us can unlink it, which would cause us to barf. The codepath has been updated to retry when such a race is detected, instead of outright failing.
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 representation to have parsed wen reading from them. These codepaths have been optimized by taking advantage of these access patterns.
Object lookup logic, when the object hashtable starts to become crowded, has been optimized.
When TEST_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY setting is used, it was handled somewhat inconsistently between the test framework and t/Makefile, and logic to summarize the results looked at a wrong place.
"git clone" uses a lighter-weight implementation when making sure that the history behind refs are complete.
Many warnings from sparse source checker in compat/ area has been squelched.
The code to reading and updating packed-refs file has been updated, correcting corner case bugs.
Fixes since v1.8.3:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.3 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).
Newer Net::SMTP::SSL module does not want the user programs to use the default behaviour to let server certificate go without verification, so by default enable the verification with a mechanism to turn it off if needed. (merge 35035bb rr/send-email-ssl-verify later to maint).
When "git" is spawned in such a way that any of the low 3 file descriptors is closed, our first open() may yield file descriptor 2, and writing error message to it would screw things up in a big way. (merge a11c396 tr/protect-low-3-fds later to maint).
The mailmap mechanism unnecessarily downcased the e-mail addresses in the output, and also ignored the human name when it is a single character name. (merge bd23794 jc/mailmap-case-insensitivity later to maint).
In two places we did not check return value (expected to be a file descriptor) correctly. (merge a77f106 tr/fd-gotcha-fixes later to maint).
Logic to auto-detect character encodings in the commit log message did not reject overlong and invalid UTF-8 characters. (merge 81050ac bc/commit-invalid-utf8 later to maint).
Pass port number as a separate argument when "send-email" initializes Net::SMTP, instead of as a part of the hostname, i.e. host:port. This allows GSSAPI codepath to match with the hostname given. (merge 1a741bf bc/send-email-use-port-as-separate-param later to maint).
"git diff" refused to even show difference when core.safecrlf is set to true (i.e. error out) and there are offending lines in the working tree files. (merge 5430bb2 jc/maint-diff-core-safecrlf later to maint).
A test that should have failed but didn't revealed a bug that needs to be corrected. (merge 94d75d1 jc/t1512-fix later to maint).
An overlong path to a .git directory may have overflown the temporary path buffer used to create a name for lockfiles. (merge 2fbd4f9 mh/maint-lockfile-overflow later to maint).
Invocations of "git checkout" used internally by "git rebase" were counted as "checkout", and affected later "git checkout -" to the the user to an unexpected place. (merge 3bed291 rr/rebase-checkout-reflog later to maint).
"git stash save", when your local change turns a tracked file into a directory, has to remove files in that directory in order to revert your working tree to a pristine state. This will lose untracked files in such a directory, and the command now requires you to "--force" it.
The configuration variable column.ui was poorly documented. (merge 5e62cc1 rr/column-doc later to maint).
"git name-rev --refs=tags/v*" were forbidden, which was a bit inconvenient (you had to give a pattern to match refs fully, like --refs=refs/tags/v*). (merge 98c5c4a nk/name-rev-abbreviated-refs later to maint).
"git apply" parsed patches that add new files, generated by programs other than Git, incorrectly. This is an old breakage in v1.7.11 and will need to be merged down to the maintanance tracks.
Older cURL wanted piece of memory we call it with to be stable, but we updated the auth material after handing it to a call.
"git pull" into nothing trashed "local changes" that were in the index, and this avoids it.
Many "git submodule" operations do not work on a submodule at a path whose name is not in ASCII.
"cherry-pick" had a small leak in an error codepath.
Logic used by git-send-email to suppress cc mishandled names like "A U. Thor" , 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). It also mishandled names that need RFC2047 quoting.
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.
The wildmatch engine did not honor WM_CASEFOLD option correctly.
"git log -c --follow $path" segfaulted upon hitting the commit that renamed the $path being followed.
When a reflog notation is used for implicit "current branch", we did not say which branch and worse said "branch ''".
"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.
"git push $there HEAD:branch" did not resolve HEAD early enough, so it was easy to flip it around while push is still going on and push out a branch that the user did not originally intended when the command was started.
The bash prompt code (in contrib/) displayed the name of the branch being rebased when "rebase -i/-m/-p" modes are in use, but not the plain vanilla "rebase".
Handling of negative exclude pattern for directories "!dir" was broken in the update to v1.8.3.
zsh prompt script that borrowed from bash prompt script did not work due to slight differences in array variable notation between these two shells.
An entry for "file://" scheme in the enumeration of URL types Git can take in the HTML documentation was made into a clickable link by mistake.
"git push --[no-]verify" was not documented.
Stop installing the git-remote-testpy script that is only used for testing.
"git commit --allow-empty-message -m ''" should not start an editor.
"git merge @{-1}~22" was rewritten to "git merge frotz@{1}~22" incorrectly when your previous branch was "frotz" (it should be rewritten to "git merge frotz~22" instead).
"git diff -c -p" was not showing a deleted line from a hunk when another hunk immediately begins where the earlier one ends.
"git log --ancestry-path A...B" did not work as expected, as it did not pay attention to the fact that the merge base between A and B was the bottom of the range being specified.
Mac OS X does not like to write(2) more than INT_MAX number of bytes; work it around by chopping write(2) into smaller pieces.
Newer MacOS X encourages the programs to compile and link with their CommonCrypto, not with OpenSSL.
"git clone foo/bar:baz" cannot be a request to clone from a remote over git-over-ssh specified in the scp style. This case is now detected and clones from a local repository at "foo/bar:baz".
When $HOME is misconfigured to point at an unreadable directory, we used to complain and die. Loosen the check.
"git subtree" (in contrib/) had one codepath with loose error checks to lose data at the remote side.
"git fetch" into a shallow repository from a repository that does not know about the shallow boundary commits (e.g. a different fork from the repository the current shallow repository was cloned from) did not work correctly.
"git checkout foo" DWIMs the intended "upstream" and turns it into "git checkout -t -b foo remotes/origin/foo". This codepath has been updated to correctly take existing remote definitions into account.

New in Git 1.8.3.4 (Jul 23, 2013)

New in Git 1.8.3.3 (Jul 16, 2013)

New in Git 1.8.3.2 (Jul 1, 2013)

Fixes since v1.8.3.1:
Cloning with "git clone --depth N" while fetch.fsckobjects (or transfer.fsckobjects) is set to true did not tell the cut-off points of the shallow history to the process that validates the objects and the history received, causing the validation to fail.
"git checkout foo" DWIMs the intended "upstream" and turns it into "git checkout -t -b foo remotes/origin/foo". This codepath has been updated to correctly take existing remote definitions into account.
"git fetch" into a shallow repository from a repository that does not know about the shallow boundary commits (e.g. a different fork from the repository the current shallow repository was cloned from) did not work correctly.
"git subtree" (in contrib/) had one codepath with loose error checks to lose data at the remote side.
"git log --ancestry-path A...B" did not work as expected, as it did not pay attention to the fact that the merge base between A and B was the bottom of the range being specified.
"git diff -c -p" was not showing a deleted line from a hunk when another hunk immediately begins where the earlier one ends.
"git merge @{-1}~22" was rewritten to "git merge frotz@{1}~22" incorrectly when your previous branch was "frotz" (it should be rewritten to "git merge frotz~22" instead).
"git commit --allow-empty-message -m ''" should not start an editor.
"git push --[no-]verify" was not documented.
An entry for "file://" scheme in the enumeration of URL types Git can take in the HTML documentation was made into a clickable link by mistake.
zsh prompt script that borrowed from bash prompt script did not work due to slight differences in array variable notation between these two shells.
The bash prompt code (in contrib/) displayed the name of the branch being rebased when "rebase -i/-m/-p" modes are in use, but not the plain vanilla "rebase".
"git push $there HEAD:branch" did not resolve HEAD early enough, so it was easy to flip it around while push is still going on and push out a branch that the user did not originally intended when the command was started.
"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.

New in Git 1.8.3.1 (Jun 11, 2013)

New in Git 1.8.3 (May 25, 2013)

UPDATES SINCE V1.8.2:
Foreign interface:
remote-hg and remote-bzr helpers (in contrib/ since v1.8.2) have been updated; especially, the latter has been done in an accelerated schedule (read: we may not have merged to this release if we were following the usual "cook sufficiently in next before unleashing it to the world" workflow) in order to help Emacs folks, whose primary SCM seems to be stagnating.
UI, Workflows & Features:
A handful of updates applied to gitk, including an addition of "revert" action, showing dates in tags in a nicer way, making colors configurable, and support for -G'pickaxe' search.
The prompt string generator (in contrib/completion/) learned to show how many changes there are in total and how many have been replayed during a "git rebase" session.
"git branch --vv" learned to paint the name of the branch it integrates with in a different color (color.branch.upstream, which defaults to blue).
In a sparsely populated working tree, "git checkout " no longer unmarks paths that match the given pathspec that were originally ignored with "--sparse" (use --ignore-skip-worktree-bits option to resurrect these paths out of the index if you really want to).
"git log --format" specifier learned %C(auto) token that tells Git to use color when interpolating %d (decoration), %h (short commit object name), etc. for terminal output.
"git bisect" leaves the final outcome as a comment in its bisect log file.
"git clone --reference" can now refer to a gitfile "textual symlink" that points at the real location of the repository.
"git count-objects" learned "--human-readable" aka "-H" option to show various large numbers in Ki/Mi/GiB scaled as necessary.
"git cherry-pick $blob" and "git cherry-pick $tree" are nonsense, and a more readable error message e.g. "can't cherry-pick a tree" is given (we used to say "expected exactly one commit").
The "--annotate" option to "git send-email" can be turned on (or off) by default with sendemail.annotate configuration variable (you can use --no-annotate from the command line to override it).
The "--cover-letter" option to "git format-patch" can be turned on (or off) by default with format.coverLetter configuration variable. By setting it to 'auto', you can turn it on only for a series with two or more patches.
The bash completion support (in contrib/) learned that cherry-pick takes a few more options than it already knew about.
"git help" learned "-g" option to show the list of guides just like list of commands are given with "-a".
A triangular "pull from one place, push to another place" workflow is supported better by new remote.pushdefault (overrides the "origin" thing) and branch.*.pushremote (overrides the branch.*.remote) configuration variables.
"git status" learned to report that you are in the middle of a revert session, just like it does for a cherry-pick and a bisect session.
The handling by "git branch --set-upstream-to" against various forms of erroneous inputs was suboptimal and has been improved.
When the interactive access to git-shell is not enabled, it issues a message meant to help the system administrator to enable it. An explicit way has been added to issue custom messages to refuse an access over the network to help the end users who connect to the service expecting an interactive shell.
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.
"git status" suggests users to look into using --untracked=no option when it takes too long.
"git status" shows a bit more information 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.
Output from "git log --graph" works better with submodule log output now.
"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 merge" and "git pull" can optionally be told to inspect and reject when merging a commit that does not carry a trusted GPG signature.
"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 what other backends expect.
"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, it now refrains from overwriting the copy in the working tree and leaves the temporary file so that changes can be merged manually.
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 handful of issues in the code that traverses the working tree to find untracked and/or ignored files have been fixed, and the general codepath involved in "status -u" and "clean" have been cleaned up and optimized.
The stack footprint of some codepaths that access an object from a pack has been shrunk.
The logic to coalesce the same lines removed from the parents in the output from "diff -c/--cc" has been updated, but with O(n^2) complexity, so this might turn out to be undesirable.
The code to enforce permission bits on files in $GIT_DIR/ for shared repositories has been simplified.
A few codepaths know how much data they need to put in the hashtables they use when they start, but still began with small tables and repeatedly grew and rehashed them.
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.
The 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 on 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.
A few bug fixes to "git rerere" working on corner case merge conflicts have been applied.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V1.8.2:
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).
Recent versions of File::Temp (used by "git svn") started blowing up when its tempfile sub is called as a class method; updated the callsite to call it as a plain vanilla function to fix it. (merge eafc2dd hb/git-pm-tempfile later to maint).
Various subcommands of "git remote" simply ignored extraneous command line arguments instead of diagnosing them as errors.
When receive-pack detects an error in the pack header it received in order to decide which of unpack-objects or index-pack to run, it returned without closing the error stream, which led to a hung sideband thread.
Zsh completion forgot that the '%' character used to signal untracked files needs to be escaped with another '%'.
A commit object whose author or committer ident are malformed crashed some code that trusted that a name, an email and a timestamp can always be found in it.
When "upload-pack" fails while generating a pack in response to "git fetch" (or "git clone"), the receiving side had a programming error that triggered the die handler recursively.
"rev-list --stdin" and friends kept bogus pointers into the input buffer around as human readable object names. This was not a huge problem but was exposed by a new change that uses these names in error output.
Smart-capable HTTP servers were not restricted via the GIT_NAMESPACE mechanism when talking with commit-walking clients, like they are when talking with smart HTTP clients. (merge 6130f86 jk/http-dumb-namespaces later to maint).
"git merge-tree" did not omit a merge result that is identical to the "our" side in certain cases. (merge aacecc3 jk/merge-tree-added-identically later to maint).
Perl scripts like "git-svn" closed (instead of redirecting to /dev/null) the standard error stream, which is not a very smart thing to do. A later open may return file descriptor #2 for an unrelated purpose, and error reporting code may write into it.
"git show-branch" was not prepared to show a very long run of ancestor operators e.g. foobar^2~2^2^2^2...^2~4 correctly.
"git diff --diff-algorithm algo" is also understood as "git diff --diff-algorithm=algo".
The new core.commentchar configuration was not applied in a few places.
"git bundle" erroneously bailed out when parsing a valid bundle containing a prerequisite commit without a commit message.
"git log -S/-G" started paying attention to textconv filter, but there was no way to disable this. Make it honor the --no-textconv option.
When used with the "-d temporary-directory" option, "git filter-branch" failed to come back to the original working tree to perform the final clean-up procedure.
"git merge $(git rev-parse v1.8.2)" behaved quite differently from "git merge v1.8.2", as if v1.8.2 were written as v1.8.2^0 and did not pay much attention to the annotated tag payload. Make the code notice the type of the tag object, in addition to the dwim_ref() based classification the current code uses (i.e. the name appears in refs/tags/) to decide when to special-case tag merging.
Fix a 1.8.1.x regression that stopped matching "dir" (without a trailing slash) to a directory "dir".
"git apply --whitespace=fix" was not prepared to see a line getting longer after fixing whitespaces (e.g. tab-in-indent aka Python).
The prompt string generator (in contrib/completion/) did not notice when we are in a middle of a "git revert" session.
"submodule summary --summary-limit" option did not support the "--option=value" form.
"index-pack --fix-thin" used an uninitialized value to compute the delta depths of objects it appends to the resulting pack.
"index-pack --verify-stat" used a few counters outside the protection of a mutex, possibly showing incorrect numbers.
The code to keep track of what directory names are known to Git on platforms with case insensitive filesystems could get confused upon a hash collision between these pathnames and would loop forever.
Annotated tags outside the refs/tags/ hierarchy were not advertised correctly to ls-remote and fetch with recent versions of Git.
Recent optimizations broke shallow clones.
"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 " always said "Updated tag ''" even when creating a new tag (i.e. neither 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" reported a failure when asked to create an archive out of an empty tree. It is more intuitive to give an empty archive back in such a case.
When "format-patch" quoted a non-ascii string in header files, it incorrectly applied rfc2047 and chopped a single character in the middle of the string.
An aliased command spawned from a bare repository that does not say it is bare with "core.bare = yes" was treated as non-bare by mistake.
In "git reflog expire", the 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=" option of "git describe", when used with "--all" to allow refs that are not annotated tags to be a base of description, did not restrict the output from the command to those refs 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=" argument to the commands in the diff family was described poorly.
The arguments given to the pre-rebase hook were not documented.
The v4 index format was not documented.
The "--match=" 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 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 to 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. It now issues errors in many cases.
Verification of signed tags was 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 is a common alternative spelling of UTF-8.
When export-subst is used, "zip" output recorded an 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 the messages in the order the writing MUA meant to, by sorting numeric segments in numeric order and non-numeric segments in alphabetical order.
"git submodule update", when recursed into sub-submodules, did not accumulate the prefix paths.

New in Git 1.8.2.3 (May 10, 2013)

New in Git 1.8.3 RC 0 (Apr 27, 2013)

UPDATES SINCE V1.8.2:
Foreign interface:
remote-hg and remote-bzr helpers (in contrib/) have been updated.
UI, Workflows & Features:
"git branch --vv" learned to paint the name of the branch it integrates with in a different color (color.branch.upstream, which defaults to blue).
In a sparsely populated working tree, "git checkout " no longer unmarks paths that match the given pathspec that were originally ignored with "--sparse" (use --ignore-skip-worktree-bits option to resurrect these paths out of the index if you really want to).
"git log --format" specifier learned %C(auto) token that tells Git to use color when interpolating %d (decoration), %h (short commit object name), etc. for terminal output.
"git bisect" leaves the final outcome as a comment in its bisect log file.
"git clone --reference" can now refer to a gitfile "textual symlink" that points at the real location of the repository.
"git count-objects" learned "--human-readable" aka "-H" option to show various large numbers in Ki/Mi/GiB scaled as necessary.
"git cherry-pick $blob" and "git cherry-pick $tree" are nonsense, and a more readable error message e.g. "can't cherry-pick a tree" is given (we used to say "expected exactly one commit").
The "--annotate" option to "git send-email" can be turned on (or off) by default with sendemail.annotate configuration variable (you can use --no-annotate from the command line to override it).
The "--cover-letter" option to "git format-patch" can be turned on (or off) by default with format.coverLetter configuration variable. By setting it to 'auto', you can turn it on only for a series with two or more patches.
The bash completion support (in contrib/) learned that cherry-pick takes a few more options than it already knew about.
"git help" learned "-g" option to show the list of guides just like list of commands are given with "-a".
A triangular "pull from one place, push to another place" workflow is supported better by new remote.pushdefault (overrides the "origin" thing) and branch.*.pushremote (overrides the branch.*.remote) configuration variables.
"git status" learned to report that you are in the middle of a revert session, just like it does for a cherry-pick and a bisect session.
The handling by "git branch --set-upstream-to" against various forms of erroneous inputs was suboptimal and has been improved.
When the interactive access to git-shell is not enabled, it issues a message meant to help the system administrator 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.
"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.
Output from "git log --graph" works better with submodule log output now.
"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 merge" and "git pull" can optionally be told to inspect and reject when merging a commit that does not carry a trusted GPG signature.
"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 handful of issues in the code to traverse working tree to find untracked and/or ignored files have been fixed, and the general codepath involved in "status -u" and "clean" have been cleaned up and optimized.
The stack footprint of some codepaths that access an object from a pack has been shrunk.
The logic to coalesce the same lines removed from the parents in the output from "diff -c/--cc" has been updated, but with an O(n^2) complexity, so this might turn out to be undesirable.
The code to enforce permission bits on files in $GIT_DIR/ for shared repositories have been simplified.
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.
A few bugfixes to "git rerere" working on corner case merge conflicts have been applied.
Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V1.8.2:
When receive-pack detects error in the pack header it received in order to decide which of unpack-objects or index-pack to run, it returned without closing the error stream, which led to a hang sideband thread.
Zsh completion forgot that '%' character used to signal untracked files needs to be escaped with another '%'.
A commit object whose author or committer ident are malformed crashed some code that trusted that a name, an email and an timestamp can always be found in it.
When "upload-pack" fails while generating a pack in response to "git fetch" (or "git clone"), the receiving side mistakenly said there was a programming error to trigger the die handler recursively.
"rev-list --stdin" and friends kept bogus pointers into input buffer around as human readble object names. This was not a huge problem but was exposed by a new change that uses these names in error output. (merge 70d26c6 tr/copy-revisions-from-stdin later to maint).
Smart-capable HTTP servers were not restricted via the GIT_NAMESPACE mechanism when talking with commit-walker clients, like they do when talking with smart HTTP clients. (merge 6130f86 jk/http-dumb-namespaces later to maint).
"git merge-tree" did not omit a merge result that is identical to "our" side in certain cases. (merge aacecc3 jk/merge-tree-added-identically later to maint).
Perl scripts like "git-svn" closed (not redirecting to /dev/null) the standard error stream, which is not a very smart thing to do. Later open may return file descriptor #2 for unrelated purpose, and error reporting code may write into them.
"git show-branch" was not prepared to show a very long run of ancestor operators e.g. foobar^2~2^2^2^2...^2~4 correctly.
"git diff --diff-algorithm algo" is also understood as "git diff --diff-algorithm=algo".
The new core.commentchar configuration was not applied to a few places.
"git bundle" did not like a bundle created using a commit without any message as its one of the prerequistes.
"git log -S/-G" started paying attention to textconv filter, but there was no way to disable this. Make it honor --no-textconv option.
When used with "-d temporary-directory" option, "git filter-branch" failed to come back to the original working tree to perform the final clean-up procedure.
"git merge $(git rev-parse v1.8.2)" behaved quite differently from "git merge v1.8.2", as if v1.8.2 were written as v1.8.2^0 and did not pay much attention to the annotated tag payload. Make the code notice the type of the tag object, in addition to the dwim_ref() based classification the current code uses (i.e. the name appears in refs/tags/) to decide when to special case merging of tags.
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.
"submodule summary --summary-limit" option did not support "--option=value" form.
"index-pack --fix-thin" used an uninitialized value to compute delta depths of objects it appends to the resulting pack.
"index-pack --verify-stat" used a few counters outside protection of mutex, possibly showing incorrect numbers.
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.
"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 " always said "Updated 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=" 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=" 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=" 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 accumulate the prefix paths.

New in Git 1.8.2.2 (Apr 27, 2013)

Fixes since v1.8.2.1:
Zsh completion forgot that '%' character used to signal untracked files needs to be escaped with another '%'.
A commit object whose author or committer ident are malformed crashed some code that trusted that a name, an email and an timestamp can always be found in it.
The new core.commentchar configuration was not applied to a few places.
"git pull --rebase" did not pass "-v/-q" options to underlying "git rebase".
When receive-pack detects error in the pack header it received in order to decide which of unpack-objects or index-pack to run, it returned without closing the error stream, which led to a hang sideband thread.
"git diff --diff-algorithm=algo" was understood by the command line parser, but "git diff --diff-algorithm algo" was not.
"git log -S/-G" started paying attention to textconv filter, but there was no way to disable this. Make it honor --no-textconv option.
"git merge $(git rev-parse v1.8.2)" behaved quite differently from "git merge v1.8.2", as if v1.8.2 were written as v1.8.2^0 and did not pay much attention to the annotated tag payload. Make the code notice the type of the tag object, in addition to the dwim_ref() based classification the current code uses (i.e. the name appears in refs/tags/) to decide when to special case merging of tags.
"git cherry-pick" and "git revert" can take more than one commit on the command line these days, but it was not mentioned on the usage text.
Perl scripts like "git-svn" closed (not redirecting to /dev/null) the standard error stream, which is not a very smart thing to do. Later open may return file descriptor #2 for unrelated purpose, and error reporting code may write into them.
"git apply --whitespace=fix" was not prepared to see a line getting longer after fixing whitespaces (e.g. tab-in-indent aka Python).
"git diff/log --cc" did not work well with options that ignore whitespace changes.
Documentation on setting up a http server that requires authentication only on the push but not fetch has been clarified.
A few bugfixes to "git rerere" working on corner case merge conflicts have been applied.
"git bundle" did not like a bundle created using a commit without any message as its one of the prerequistes.

New in Git 1.8.2.1 (Apr 8, 2013)

Fixes since v1.8.2:
An earlier change to the attribute system introduced at v1.8.1.2 by mistake stopped a pattern "dir" (without trailing slash) from matching a directory "dir" (it only wanted to allow pattern "dir/" to also match).
Verification of signed tags were not done correctly when not in C or en/US locale.
'git commit -m "$msg"' used to add an extra newline even when $msg already ended with one.
The "--match=" 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.
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.
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.
"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.
"git tag -f " always said "Updated tag ''" even when creating a new tag (i.e. not overwriting nor updating).
"git cmd -- ':(top'" was not diagnosed as an invalid syntax, and instead the parser kept reading beyond the end of the string.
Annotated tags outside refs/tags/ hierarchy were not advertised correctly to the ls-remote and fetch with recent version of Git.
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.
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.
"git submodule update", when recursed into sub-submodules, did not acccumulate the prefix paths.
"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.
When export-subst is used, "zip" output recorded incorrect size of the file.
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.
"git branch" did not bother to check nonsense command line parameters and issue errors in many cases.
"git update-index -h" did not do the usual "-h(elp)" thing.
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.
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.
"git index-pack" had a buffer-overflow while preparing an informational message when the translated version of it was too long.
Clarify in the documentation "what" gets pushed to "where" when the command line to "git push" does not say these explicitly.
In "git reflog expire", REACHABLE bit was not cleared from the correct objects.
The "--color=" 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=" 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 merge-tree" had a typo in the logic to detect d/f conflicts, which caused it to segfault in some cases.

New in Git 1.8.2 (Mar 14, 2013)

UPDATES SINCE V1.8.1:
UI, Workflows & Features:
Initial ports to QNX and z/OS UNIX System Services have started.
Output from the tests is coloured using "green is okay, yellow is questionable, red is bad and blue is informative" scheme.
Mention of "GIT/Git/git" in the documentation have been updated to be more uniform and consistent. The name of the system and the concept it embodies is "Git"; the command the users type is "git". All-caps "GIT" was merely a way to imitate "Git" typeset in small caps in our ASCII text only documentation and to be avoided.
The completion script (in contrib/completion) used to let the default completer to suggest pathnames, which gave too many irrelevant choices (e.g. "git add" would not want to add an unmodified path). It learnt to use a more git-aware logic to enumerate only relevant ones.
In bare repositories, "git shortlog" and other commands now read mailmap files from the tip of the history, to help running these tools in server settings.
Color specifiers, e.g. "%C(blue)Hello%C(reset)", used in the "--format=" option of "git log" and friends can be disabled when the output is not sent to a terminal by prefixing them with "auto,", e.g. "%C(auto,blue)Hello%C(auto,reset)".
Scripts can ask Git that wildcard patterns in pathspecs they give do not have any significance, i.e. take them as literal strings.
The patterns in .gitignore and .gitattributes files can have **/, as a pattern that matches 0 or more levels of subdirectory. E.g. "foo/**/bar" matches "bar" in "foo" itself or in a subdirectory of "foo".
When giving arguments without "--" disambiguation, object names that come earlier on the command line must not be interpretable as pathspecs and pathspecs that come later on the command line must not be interpretable as object names. This disambiguation rule has been tweaked so that ":/" (no other string before or after) is always interpreted as a pathspec; "git cmd -- :/" is no longer needed, you can just say "git cmd :/".
Various "hint" lines Git gives when it asks the user to edit messages in the editor are commented out with '#' by default. The core.commentchar configuration variable can be used to customize this '#' to a different character.
"git add -u" and "git add -A" without pathspec issues warning to make users aware that they are only operating on paths inside the subdirectory they are in. Use ":/" (everything from the top) or "." (everything from the $cwd) to disambiguate.
"git blame" (and "git diff") learned the "--no-follow" option.
"git branch" now rejects some nonsense combinations of command line arguments (e.g. giving more than one branch name to rename) with more case-specific error messages.
"git check-ignore" command to help debugging .gitignore files has been added.
"git cherry-pick" can be used to replay a root commit to an unborn branch.
"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 real ref that is pointed at by the symbolic ref would be updated anyway). Symbolic refs no longer are affected by such a fetch.
"git format-patch" now detects more cases in which a whole branch is being exported, and uses the description for the branch, when asked to write a cover letter for the series.
"git format-patch" learned "-v $count" option, and prepends a string "v$count-" to the names of its output files, and also automatically sets the subject prefix to "PATCH v$count". This allows patches from rerolled series to be stored under different names and makes it easier to reuse cover letter messages.
"git log" and friends can be told with --use-mailmap option to rewrite the names and email addresses of people using the mailmap mechanism.
"git log --cc --graph" now shows the combined diff output with the ancestry graph.
"git log --grep=" 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.
"git mergetool" is aware of TortoiseGitMerge now and uses it over TortoiseMerge when available.
"git push" now requires "-f" to update a tag, even if it is a fast-forward, as tags are meant to be fixed points.
Error messages from "git push" when it stops to prevent remote refs from getting overwritten by mistake have been improved to explain various situations separately.
"git push" will stop without doing anything if the new "pre-push" hook exists and exits with a failure.
When "git rebase" fails to generate patches to be applied (e.g. due to oom), it failed to detect the failure and instead behaved as if there were nothing to do. A workaround to use a temporary file has been applied, but we probably would want to revisit this later, as it hurts the common case of not failing at all.
Input and preconditions to "git reset" has been loosened where appropriate. "git reset $fromtree Makefile" requires $fromtree to be any tree (it used to require it to be a commit), for example. "git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on).
"git status" says what branch is being bisected or rebased when able, not just "bisecting" or "rebasing".
"git submodule" started learning a new mode to integrate with the 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:
"git fast-export" has been updated for its use in the context of the remote helper interface.
A new remote helper to interact with bzr has been added to contrib/.
"git p4" got various bugfixes around its branch handling. It is also made usable with Python 2.4/2.5. In addition, its various portability issues for Cygwin have been addressed.
The remote helper to interact with Hg in contrib/ has seen a few fixes.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc:
"git fsck" has been taught to be pickier about entries in tree objects that should not be there, e.g. ".", ".git", and "..".
Matching paths with common forms of pathspecs that contain wildcard characters has been optimized further.
We stopped paying attention to $GIT_CONFIG environment that points at a single configuration file from any command other than "git config" quite a while ago, but "git clone" internally set, exported, and then unexported the variable during its operation unnecessarily.
"git reset" internals has been reworked and should be faster in general. We tried to be careful not to break any behaviour but there could be corner cases, especially when running the command from a conflicted state, that we may have missed.
The implementation of "imap-send" has been updated to reuse xml quoting code from http-push codepath, and lost a lot of unused code.
There is a simple-minded checker for the test scripts in t/ directory to catch most common mistakes (it is not enabled by default).
You can build with USE_WILDMATCH=YesPlease to use a replacement implementation of pattern matching logic used for pathname-like things, e.g. refnames and paths in the repository. This new implementation is not expected change the existing behaviour of Git in this release, except for "git for-each-ref" where you can now say "refs/**/master" and match with both refs/heads/master and refs/remotes/origin/master. We plan to use this new implementation in wider places (e.g. "git ls-files '**/Makefile' may find Makefile at the top-level, and "git log '**/t*.sh'" may find commits that touch a shell script whose name begins with "t" at any level) in future versions of Git, but we are not there yet. By building with USE_WILDMATCH, using the resulting Git daily and reporting when you find breakages, you can help us get closer to that goal.
Some reimplementations of Git do not write all the stat info back to the index due to their implementation limitations (e.g. jgit). A configuration option can tell Git to ignore changes to most of the stat fields and only pay attention to mtime and size, which 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.
FIXES SINCE V1.8.1:
An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES list that does not name the real path to a directory (i.e. a symbolic link) could have caused the GIT_DIR discovery logic to escape the ceiling.
When attempting to read the XDG-style $HOME/.config/git/config and finding that $HOME/.config/git is a file, we gave a wrong error message, instead of treating the case as "a custom config file does not exist there" and moving on.
The behaviour visible to the end users was confusing, when they attempt to kill a process spawned in the editor that was in turn launched by Git with SIGINT (or SIGQUIT), as Git would catch that signal and die. We ignore these signals now. (merge 0398fc34 pf/editor-ignore-sigint later to maint).
A child process that was killed by a signal (e.g. SIGINT) was reported in an inconsistent way depending on how the process was spawned by us, with or without a shell in between.
After failing to create a temporary file using mkstemp(), failing pathname was not reported correctly on some platforms.
We used to stuff "user@" and then append what we read from /etc/mailname to come up with a default e-mail ident, but a bug lost the "user@" part.
The attribute mechanism didn't allow limiting attributes to be applied to only a single directory itself with "path/" like the exclude mechanism does. The initial implementation of this that was merged to 'maint' and 1.8.1.2 was with a severe performance degradations and needs to merge a fix-up topic.
The smart HTTP clients forgot to verify the content-type that comes back from the server side to make sure that the request is being handled properly.
"git am" did not parse datestamp correctly from Hg generated patch, when it is run in a locale outside C (or en).
"git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing excess trailing blank lines.
"git apply --summary" has been taught to make sure the similarity value shown in its output is sensible, even when the input had a bogus value.
A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy.
"git archive" did not record uncompressed size in the header when streaming a zip archive, which confused some implementations of unzip.
"git archive" did not parse configuration values in tar.* namespace correctly. (merge b3873c3 jk/config-parsing-cleanup later to maint).
Attempt to "branch --edit-description" an existing branch, while being on a detached HEAD, errored out.
"git clean" showed what it was going to do, but sometimes end up finding that it was not allowed to do so, which resulted in a confusing output (e.g. after saying that it will remove an untracked directory, it found an embedded git repository there which it is not allowed to remove). It now performs the actions and then reports the outcome more faithfully.
When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created. This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update.
"git cvsimport" mishandled timestamps at DST boundary.
We used to have an arbitrary 32 limit for combined diff input, resulting in incorrect number of leading colons shown when showing the "--raw --cc" output.
"git fetch --depth" was broken in at least three ways. The resulting history was deeper than specified by one commit, it was unclear how to wipe the shallowness of the repository with the command, and documentation was misleading. (merge cfb70e1 nd/fetch-depth-is-broken later to maint).
"git log --all -p" that walked refs/notes/textconv/ ref can later try to use the textconv data incorrectly after it gets freed.
We forgot to close the file descriptor reading from "gpg" output, killing "git log --show-signature" on a long history.
The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system.
The --graph code fell into infinite loop when asked to do what the code did not expect.
http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the authentication is done by certificate identity.
"git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that created new refs had a nasty race.
Rebasing the history of superproject with change in the submodule has been broken since v1.7.12.
After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted.
"git clone" used to allow --bare and --separate-git-dir=$there options at the same time, which was nonsensical.
"git rebase --preserve-merges" lost empty merges in recent versions of Git.
"git merge --no-edit" computed who were involved in the work done on the side branch, even though that information is to be discarded without getting seen in the editor.
"git merge" started calling prepare-commit-msg hook like "git commit" does some time ago, but forgot to pay attention to the exit status of the hook.
A failure to push due to non-ff while on an unborn branch dereferenced a NULL pointer when showing an error message.
When users spell "cc:" in lowercase in the fake "header" in the trailer part, "git send-email" failed to pick up the addresses from there. As e-mail headers field names are case insensitive, this script should follow suit and treat "cc:" and "Cc:" the same way.
Output from "git status --ignored" showed an unexpected interaction with "--untracked".
"gitweb", when sorting by age to show repositories with new activities first, used to sort repositories with absolutely nothing in it early, which was not very useful.
"gitweb"'s code to sanitize control characters before passing it to "highlight" filter lost known-to-be-safe control characters by mistake.
"gitweb" pages served over HTTPS, when configured to show picon or gravatar, referred to these external resources to be fetched via HTTP, resulting in mixed contents warning in browsers.
When a line to be wrapped has a solid run of non space characters whose length exactly is the wrap width, "git shortlog -w" failed to add a newline after such a line.
Command line completion leaked an unnecessary error message while looking for possible matches with paths in .
Command line completion for "tcsh" emitted an unwanted space after completing a single directory name.
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 50995ed 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.
Some scripted programs written in Python did not get updated when PYTHON_PATH changed. (cherry-pick 96a4647fca54031974cd6ad1 later to maint).
When autoconf is used, any build on a different commit always ran "config.status --recheck" even when unnecessary.
A fix was added to the build procedure to work around buggy versions of ccache broke the auto-generation of dependencies, which unfortunately is still relevant because some people use ancient distros.
The autoconf subsystem passed --mandir down to generated config.mak.autogen but forgot to do the same for --htmldir. (merge 55d9bf0 ct/autoconf-htmldir later to maint).
A change made on v1.8.1.x maintenance track had a nasty regression to break the build when autoconf is used. (merge 7f1b697 jn/less-reconfigure later to maint).
We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an old version of the tutorial; removed.
t0050 had tests expecting failures from a bug that was fixed some time ago.
t4014, t9502 and t0200 tests had various portability issues that broke on OpenBSD.
t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues.
t9200 runs "cvs init" on a directory that already exists, but a platform can configure this fail for the current user (e.g. you need to be in the cvsadmin group on NetBSD 6.0).
t9020 and t9810 had a few non-portable shell script construct.
Scripts to test bash completion was inherently flaky as it was affected by whatever random things the user may have on $PATH.
An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES could be a "logical" pathname that uses a symbolic link to point at somewhere else (e.g. /home/me that points at /net/host/export/home/me, and the latter directory is automounted). Earlier when Git saw such a pathname e.g. /home/me on this environment variable, the "ceiling" mechanism did not take effect. With this release (the fix has also been merged to the v1.8.1.x maintenance series), elements on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES are by default checked for such aliasing coming from symbolic links. As this needs to actually resolve symbolic links for each element on the GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES, you can disable this mechanism for some elements by listing them after an empty element on the GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES. e.g. Setting /home/me::/home/him to GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES makes Git resolve symbolic links in /home/me when checking if the current directory is under /home/me, but does not do so for /home/him. (merge 7ec30aa mh/maint-ceil-absolute later to maint).

New in Git 1.8.1.5 (Mar 2, 2013)

New in Git 1.8.1.4 (Feb 20, 2013)

New in Git 1.8.2 RC 0 (Feb 18, 2013)

UPDATES SINCE V1.8.1:
UI, Workflows & Features:
Initial ports to QNX and z/OS UNIX System Services have started.
Output from the tests is coloured using "green is okay, yellow is questionable, red is bad and blue is informative" scheme.
Mention of "GIT/Git/git" in the documentation have been updated to be more uniform and consistent. The name of the system and the concept it embodies is "Git"; the command the users type is "git". All-caps "GIT" was merely a way to imitate "Git" typeset in small caps in our ASCII text only documentation and to be avoided.
The completion script (in contrib/completion) used to let the default completer to suggest pathnames, which gave too many irrelevant choices (e.g. "git add" would not want to add an unmodified path). It learnt to use a more git-aware logic to enumerate only relevant ones.
In bare repositories, "git shortlog" and other commands now read mailmap files from the tip of the history, to help running these tools in server settings.
Color specifiers, e.g. "%C(blue)Hello%C(reset)", used in the "--format=" option of "git log" and friends can be disabled when the output is not sent to a terminal by prefixing them with "auto,", e.g. "%C(auto,blue)Hello%C(auto,reset)".
Scripts can ask Git that wildcard patterns in pathspecs they give do not have any significance, i.e. take them as literal strings.
The patterns in .gitignore and .gitattributes files can have **/, as a pattern that matches 0 or more levels of subdirectory. E.g. "foo/**/bar" matches "bar" in "foo" itself or in a subdirectory of "foo".
When giving arguments without "--" disambiguation, object names that come earlier on the command line must not be interpretable as pathspecs and pathspecs that come later on the command line must not be interpretable as object names. This disambiguation rule has been tweaked so that ":/" (no other string before or after) is always interpreted as a pathspec; "git cmd -- :/" is no longer needed, you can just say "git cmd :/".
Various "hint" lines Git gives when it asks the user to edit messages in the editor are commented out with '#' by default. The core.commentchar configuration variable can be used to customize this '#' to a different character.
"git add -u" and "git add -A" without pathspec issues warning to make users aware that they are only operating on paths inside the subdirectory they are in. Use ":/" (everything from the top) or "." (everything from the $cwd) to disambiguate.
"git blame" (and "git diff") learned the "--no-follow" option.
"git branch" now rejects some nonsense combinations of command line arguments (e.g. giving more than one branch name to rename) with more case-specific error messages.
"git check-ignore" command to help debugging .gitignore files has been added.
"git cherry-pick" can be used to replay a root commit to an unborn branch.
"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 real ref that is pointed at by the symbolic ref would be updated anyway). Symbolic refs no longer are affected by such a fetch.
"git format-patch" now detects more cases in which a whole branch is being exported, and uses the description for the branch, when asked to write a cover letter for the series.
"git format-patch" learned "-v $count" option, and prepends a string "v$count-" to the names of its output files, and also automatically sets the subject prefix to "PATCH v$count". This allows patches from rerolled series to be stored under different names and makes it easier to reuse cover letter messsages.
"git log" and friends can be told with --use-mailmap option to rewrite the names and email addresses of people using the mailmap mechanism.
"git log --cc --graph" now shows the combined diff output with the ancestry graph.
"git log --grep=" 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.
"git mergetool" is aware of TortoiseGitMerge now and uses it over TortoiseMerge when available.
"git push" now requires "-f" to update a tag, even if it is a fast-forward, as tags are meant to be fixed points.
Error messages from "git push" when it stops to prevent remote refs from getting overwritten by mistake have been improved to explain various situations separately.
"git push" will stop without doing anything if the new "pre-push" hook exists and exits with a failure.
When "git rebase" fails to generate patches to be applied (e.g. due to oom), it failed to detect the failure and instead behaved as if there were nothing to do. A workaround to use a temporary file has been applied, but we probably would want to revisit this later, as it hurts the common case of not failing at all.
Input and preconditions to "git reset" has been loosened where appropriate. "git reset $fromtree Makefile" requires $fromtree to be any tree (it used to require it to be a commit), for example. "git reset" (without options or parameters) used to error out when you do not have any commits in your history, but it now gives you an empty index (to match non-existent commit you are not even on).
"git status" says what branch is being bisected or rebased when able, not just "bisecting" or "rebasing".
"git submodule" started learning a new mode to integrate with the 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:
"git fast-export" has been updated for its use in the context of the remote helper interface.
A new remote helper to interact with bzr has been added to contrib/.
"git p4" got various bugfixes around its branch handling. It is also made usable with Python 2.4/2.5. In addition, its various portability issues for Cygwin have been addressed.
The remote helper to interact with Hg in contrib/ has seen a few fixes.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc:
"git fsck" has been taught to be pickier about entries in tree objects that should not be there, e.g. ".", ".git", and "..".
Matching paths with common forms of pathspecs that contain wildcard characters has been optimized further.
We stopped paying attention to $GIT_CONFIG environment that points at a single configuration file from any command other than "git config" quite a while ago, but "git clone" internally set, exported, and then unexported the variable during its operation unnecessarily.
"git reset" internals has been reworked and should be faster in general. We tried to be careful not to break any behaviour but there could be corner cases, especially when running the command from a conflicted state, that we may have missed.
The implementation of "imap-send" has been updated to reuse xml quoting code from http-push codepath, and lost a lot of unused code.
There is a simple-minded checker for the test scripts in t/ directory to catch most common mistakes (it is not enabled by default).
You can build with USE_WILDMATCH=YesPlease to use a replacement implementation of pattern matching logic used for pathname-like things, e.g. refnames and paths in the repository. This new implementation is not expected change the existing behaviour of Git in this release, except for "git for-each-ref" where you can now say "refs/**/master" and match with both refs/heads/master and refs/remotes/origin/master. We plan to use this new implementation in wider places (e.g. "git ls-files '**/Makefile' may find Makefile at the top-level, and "git log '**/t*.sh'" may find commits that touch a shell script whose name begins with "t" at any level) in future versions of Git, but we are not there yet. By building with USE_WILDMATCH, using the resulting Git daily and reporting when you find breakages, you can help us get closer to that goal.
Some reimplementations of Git do not write all the stat info back to the index due to their implementation limitations (e.g. jgit). A configuration option can tell Git to ignore changes to most of the stat fields and only pay attention to mtime and size, which 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.
FIXES SINCE V1.8.1:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.8.1 in the maintenance track are contained in this release (see release notes to them for details).
An element on GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES list that does not name the real path to a directory (i.e. a symbolic link) could have caused the GIT_DIR discovery logic to escape the ceiling.
When attempting to read the XDG-style $HOME/.config/git/config and finding that $HOME/.config/git is a file, we gave a wrong error message, instead of treating the case as "a custom config file does not exist there" and moving on.
The behaviour visible to the end users was confusing, when they attempt to kill a process spawned in the editor that was in turn launched by Git with SIGINT (or SIGQUIT), as Git would catch that signal and die. We ignore these signals now. (merge 0398fc34 pf/editor-ignore-sigint later to maint).
A child process that was killed by a signal (e.g. SIGINT) was reported in an inconsistent way depending on how the process was spawned by us, with or without a shell in between.
After failing to create a temporary file using mkstemp(), failing pathname was not reported correctly on some platforms.
We used to stuff "user@" and then append what we read from /etc/mailname to come up with a default e-mail ident, but a bug lost the "user@" part.
The attribute mechanism didn't allow limiting attributes to be applied to only a single directory itself with "path/" like the exclude mechanism does. The initial implementation of this that was merged to 'maint' and 1.8.1.2 was with a severe performance degradations and needs to merge a fix-up topic.
The smart HTTP clients forgot to verify the content-type that comes back from the server side to make sure that the request is being handled properly. (merge 3443db5 sp/smart-http-content-type-check later to maint).
"git am" did not parse datestamp correctly from Hg generated patch, when it is run in a locale outside C (or en).
"git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing excess trailing blank lines.
"git apply --summary" has been taught to make sure the similarity value shown in its output is sensible, even when the input had a bogus value. (merge afcb6ac jk/apply-similaritly-parsing later to maint).
A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy.
"git archive" did not record uncompressed size in the header when streaming a zip archive, which confused some implementations of unzip.
"git archive" did not parse configuration values in tar.* namespace correctly. (merge b3873c3 jk/config-parsing-cleanup later to maint).
Attempt to "branch --edit-description" an existing branch, while being on a detached HEAD, errored out.
"git clean" showed what it was going to do, but sometimes end up finding that it was not allowed to do so, which resulted in a confusing output (e.g. after saying that it will remove an untracked directory, it found an embedded git repository there which it is not allowed to remove). It now performs the actions and then reports the outcome more faithfully. (merge f538a91 zk/clean-report-failure later to maint).
When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created. This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update.
"git cvsimport" mishandled timestamps at DST boundary. (merge 48c9162 bw/get-tz-offset-perl later to maint).
We used to have an arbitrary 32 limit for combined diff input, resulting in incorrect number of leading colons shown when showing the "--raw --cc" output. (merge edbc00e jc/combine-diff-many-parents later to maint).
"git fetch --depth" was broken in at least three ways. The resulting history was deeper than specified by one commit, it was unclear how to wipe the shallowness of the repository with the command, and documentation was misleading. (merge cfb70e1 nd/fetch-depth-is-broken later to maint).
"git log --all -p" that walked refs/notes/textconv/ ref can later try to use the textconv data incorrectly after it gets freed. (merge be5c9fb jk/read-commit-buffer-data-after-free later to maint).
We forgot to close the file descriptor reading from "gpg" output, killing "git log --show-signature" on a long history.
The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system.
The --graph code fell into infinite loop when asked to do what the code did not expect.
http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the authentication is done by certificate identity.
"git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that created new refs had a nasty race.
Rebasing the history of superproject with change in the submodule has been broken since v1.7.12.
After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted.
"git clone" used to allow --bare and --separate-git-dir=$there options at the same time, which was nonsensical. (merge 95b63f1 nd/clone-no-separate-git-dir-with-bare later to maint).
"git rebase --preserve-merges" lost empty merges in recent versions of Git.
"git merge --no-edit" computed who were involved in the work done on the side branch, even though that information is to be discarded without getting seen in the editor.
"git merge" started calling prepare-commit-msg hook like "git commit" does some time ago, but forgot to pay attention to the exit status of the hook.
A failure to push due to non-ff while on an unborn branch dereferenced a NULL pointer when showing an error message.
When users spell "cc:" in lowercase in the fake "header" in the trailer part, "git send-email" failed to pick up the addresses from there. As e-mail headers field names are case insensitive, this script should follow suit and treat "cc:" and "Cc:" the same way.
Output from "git status --ignored" showed an unexpected interaction with "--untracked".
"gitweb", when sorting by age to show repositories with new activities first, used to sort repositories with absolutely nothing in it early, which was not very useful.
"gitweb"'s code to sanitize control characters before passing it to "highlight" filter lost known-to-be-safe control characters by mistake.
"gitweb" pages served over HTTPS, when configured to show picon or gravatar, referred to these external resources to be fetched via HTTP, resulting in mixed contents warning in browsers. (merge 5748558 ab/gitweb-use-same-scheme later to maint).
When a line to be wrapped has a solid run of non space characters whose length exactly is the wrap width, "git shortlog -w" failed to add a newline after such a line.
Command line completion leaked an unnecessary error message while looking for possible matches with paths in .
Command line completion for "tcsh" emitted an unwanted space after completing a single directory name.
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.
Some scripted programs written in Python did not get updated when PYTHON_PATH changed. (cherry-pick 96a4647fca54031974cd6ad1 later to maint).
When autoconf is used, any build on a different commit always ran "config.status --recheck" even when unnecessary.
A fix was added to the build procedure to work around buggy versions of ccache broke the auto-generation of dependencies, which unfortunately is still relevant because some people use ancient distros.
The autoconf subsystem passed --mandir down to generated config.mak.autogen but forgot to do the same for --htmldir. (merge fc1c541 ct/autoconf-htmldir later to maint).
We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an old version of the tutorial; removed.
t0050 had tests expecting failures from a bug that was fixed some time ago.
t4014, t9502 and t0200 tests had various portability issues that broke on OpenBSD.
t9020 and t3600 tests had various portability issues.
t9200 runs "cvs init" on a directory that already exists, but a platform can configure this fail for the current user (e.g. you need to be in the cvsadmin group on NetBSD 6.0).
t9020 and t9810 had a few non-portable shell script construct.
Scripts to test bash completion was inherently flaky as it was affected by whatever random things the user may have on $PATH.

New in Git 1.8.1.3 (Feb 8, 2013)

New in Git 1.8.1.2 (Jan 29, 2013)

New in Git 1.8.1.1 (Jan 15, 2013)

Fixes since v1.8.1:
The attribute mechanism didn't allow limiting attributes to be applied to only a single directory itself with "path/" like the exclude mechanism does.
When attempting to read the XDG-style $HOME/.config/git/config and finding that $HOME/.config/git is a file, we gave a wrong error message, instead of treating the case as "a custom config file does not exist there" and moving on.
After failing to create a temporary file using mkstemp(), failing pathname was not reported correctly on some platforms.
http transport was wrong to ask for the username when the authentication is done by certificate identity.
The behaviour visible to the end users was confusing, when they attempt to kill a process spawned in the editor that was in turn launched by Git with SIGINT (or SIGQUIT), as Git would catch that signal and die. We ignore these signals now.
A child process that was killed by a signal (e.g. SIGINT) was reported in an inconsistent way depending on how the process was spawned by us, with or without a shell in between.
After "git add -N" and then writing a tree object out of the index, the cache-tree data structure got corrupted.
"git apply" misbehaved when fixing whitespace breakages by removing excess trailing blank lines in some corner cases.
A tar archive created by "git archive" recorded a directory in a way that made NetBSD's implementation of "tar" sometimes unhappy.
When "git clone --separate-git-dir=$over_there" is interrupted, it failed to remove the real location of the $GIT_DIR it created. This was most visible when interrupting a submodule update.
"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 real ref that is pointed at by the symbolic ref would be updated anyway). Symbolic refs no longer are affected by such a fetch.
The "log --graph" codepath fell into infinite loop in some corner cases.
"git merge" started calling prepare-commit-msg hook like "git commit" does some time ago, but forgot to pay attention to the exit status of the hook.
"git pack-refs" that ran in parallel to another process that created new refs had a race that can lose new ones.
When a line to be wrapped has a solid run of non space characters whose length exactly is the wrap width, "git shortlog -w" failed to add a newline after such a line.
The way "git svn" asked for password using SSH_ASKPASS and GIT_ASKPASS was not in line with the rest of the system.
"gitweb", when sorting by age to show repositories with new activities first, used to sort repositories with absolutely nothing in it early, which was not very useful.
"gitweb", when sorting by age to show repositories with new activities first, used to sort repositories with absolutely nothing in it early, which was not very useful.
When autoconf is used, any build on a different commit always ran "config.status --recheck" even when unnecessary.
Some scripted programs written in Python did not get updated when PYTHON_PATH changed.
We have been carrying a translated and long-unmaintained copy of an old version of the tutorial; removed.
Portability issues in many self-test scripts have been addressed.
Also contains other minor fixes and documentation updates.

New in Git 1.8.1 (Jan 3, 2013)

UPDATES SINCE V1.8.0:
UI, Workflows & Features:
Command-line completion scripts for tcsh and zsh have been added.
"git-prompt" scriptlet (in contrib/completion) can be told to paint pieces of the hints in the prompt string in colors.
Some documentation pages that used to ship only in the plain text format are now formatted in HTML as well.
We used to have a workaround for a bug in ancient "less" that causes it to exit without any output when the terminal is resized. The bug has been fixed in "less" version 406 (June 2007), and the workaround has been removed in this release.
When "git checkout" checks out a branch, it tells the user how far behind (or ahead) the new branch is relative to the remote tracking branch it builds upon. The message now also advises how to sync them up by pushing or pulling. This can be disabled with the advice.statusHints configuration variable.
"git config --get" used to diagnose presence of multiple definitions of the same variable in the same configuration file as an error, but it now applies the "last one wins" rule used by the internal configuration logic. Strictly speaking, this may be an API regression but it is expected that nobody will notice it in practice.
A new configuration variable "diff.context" can be used to give the default number of context lines in the patch output, to override the hardcoded default of 3 lines.
"git format-patch" learned the "--notes=" option to give notes for the commit after the three-dash lines in its output.
"git log -p -S" now looks for the after applying the textconv filter (if defined); earlier it inspected the contents of the blobs without filtering.
"git log --grep=" learned to honor the "grep.patterntype" configuration set to "perl".
"git replace -d " now interprets as an extended SHA-1 (e.g. HEAD~4 is allowed), instead of only accepting full hex object name.
"git rm $submodule" used to punt on removing a submodule working tree to avoid losing the repository embedded in it. Because recent git uses a mechanism to separate the submodule repository from the submodule working tree, "git rm" learned to detect this case and removes the submodule working tree when it is safe to do so.
"git send-email" used to prompt for the sender address, even when the committer identity is well specified (e.g. via user.name and user.email configuration variables). The command no longer gives this prompt when not necessary.
"git send-email" did not allow non-address garbage strings to appear after addresses on Cc: lines in the patch files (and when told to pick them up to find more recipients). The command now strips " # for v3.2 and up" part before adding the remainder of this line to the list of recipients.
"git submodule add" learned to add a new submodule at the same path as the path where an unrelated submodule was bound to in an existing revision via the "--name" option.
"git submodule sync" learned the "--recursive" option.
"diff.submodule" configuration variable can be used to give custom default value to the "git diff --submodule" option.
"git symbolic-ref" learned the "-d $symref" option to delete the named symbolic ref, which is more intuitive way to spell it than "update-ref -d --no-deref $symref".
Foreign Interface:
"git cvsimport" can be told to record timezones (other than GMT) per-author via its author info file.
The remote helper interface to interact with subversion repositories (one of the GSoC 2012 projects) has been merged.
A new remote-helper interface for Mercurial has been added to contrib/remote-helpers.
The documentation for git(1) was pointing at a page at an external site for the list of authors that no longer existed. The link has been updated to point at an alternative site.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc:
Compilation on Cygwin with newer header files are supported now.
A couple of low-level implementation updates on MinGW.
The logic to generate the initial advertisement from "upload-pack" (i.e. what is invoked by "git fetch" on the other side of the connection) to list what refs are available in the repository has been optimized.
The logic to find set of attributes that match a given path has been optimized.
Use preloadindex in "git diff-index" and "git update-index", which has a nice speedup on systems with slow stat calls (and even on Linux).
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V1.8.0:
The configuration parser had an unnecessary hardcoded limit on variable names that was not checked consistently.
The "say" function in the test scaffolding incorrectly allowed "echo" to interpret "\a" as if it were a C-string asking for a BEL output.
"git mergetool" feeds /dev/null as a common ancestor when dealing with an add/add conflict, but p4merge backend cannot handle it. Work it around by passing a temporary empty file.
"git log -F -E --grep=''" failed to use the given pattern as extended regular expression, and instead looked for the string literally.
"git grep -e pattern " asked the attribute system to read ":.gitattributes" file in the working tree, which was nonsense.
A symbolic ref refs/heads/SYM was not correctly removed with "git branch -d SYM"; the command removed the ref pointed by SYM instead.
Update "remote tracking branch" in the documentation to "remote-tracking branch".
"git pull --rebase" run while the HEAD is detached tried to find the upstream branch of the detached HEAD (which by definition does not exist) and emitted unnecessary error messages.
The refs/replace hierarchy was not mentioned in the repository-layout docs.
Various rfc2047 quoting issues around a non-ASCII name on the From: line in the output from format-patch have been corrected.
Sometimes curl_multi_timeout() function suggested a wrong timeout value when there is no file descriptor to wait on and the http transport ended up sleeping for minutes in select(2) system call. A workaround has been added for this.
For a fetch refspec (or the result of applying wildcard on one), we always want the RHS to map to something inside "refs/" hierarchy, but the logic to check it was not exactly right. (merge 5c08c1f jc/maint-fetch-tighten-refname-check later to maint).
"git diff -G" did not honor textconv filter when looking for changes.
Some HTTP servers ask for auth only during the actual packing phase (not in ls-remote phase); this is not really a recommended configuration, but the clients used to fail to authenticate with such servers. (merge 2e736fd jk/maint-http-half-auth-fetch later to maint).
"git p4" used to try expanding malformed "$keyword$" that spans across multiple lines.
Syntax highlighting in "gitweb" was not quite working.
RSS feed from "gitweb" had a xss hole in its title output.
"git config --path $key" segfaulted on "[section] key" (a boolean "true" spelled without "=", not "[section] key = true").
"git checkout -b foo" while on an unborn branch did not say "Switched to a new branch 'foo'" like other cases.
Various codepaths have workaround for a common misconfiguration to spell "UTF-8" as "utf8", but it was not used uniformly. Most notably, mailinfo (which is used by "git am") lacked this support.
We failed to mention a file without any content change but whose permission bit was modified, or (worse yet) a new file without any content in the "git diff --stat" output.
When "--stat-count" hides a diffstat for binary contents, the total number of added and removed lines at the bottom was computed incorrectly.
When "--stat-count" hides a diffstat for unmerged paths, the total number of affected files at the bottom of the "diff --stat" output was computed incorrectly.
"diff --shortstat" miscounted the total number of affected files when there were unmerged paths.
"update-ref -d --deref SYM" to delete a ref through a symbolic ref that points to it did not remove it correctly.

New in Git 1.8.0.3 (Dec 28, 2012)

New in Git 1.8.0.2 (Dec 11, 2012)

New in Git 1.8.1 RC 0 (Dec 8, 2012)

UPDATES SINCE 1.8.0:
UI, Workflows & Features:
Command-line completion scripts for tcsh and zsh have been added.
A new remote-helper interface for Mercurial has been added to contrib/remote-helpers.
We used to have a workaround for a bug in ancient "less" that causes it to exit without any output when the terminal is resized. The bug has been fixed in "less" version 406 (June 2007), and the workaround has been removed in this release.
Some documentation pages that used to ship only in the plain text format are now formatted in HTML as well.
"git-prompt" scriptlet (in contrib/completion) can be told to paint pieces of the hints in the prompt string in colors.
A new configuration variable "diff.context" can be used to give the default number of context lines in the patch output, to override the hardcoded default of 3 lines.
When "git checkout" checks out a branch, it tells the user how far behind (or ahead) the new branch is relative to the remote tracking branch it builds upon. The message now also advises how to sync them up by pushing or pulling. This can be disabled with the advice.statusHints configuration variable.
"git config --get" used to diagnose presence of multiple definitions of the same variable in the same configuration file as an error, but it now applies the "last one wins" rule used by the internal configuration logic. Strictly speaking, this may be an API regression but it is expected that nobody will notice it in practice.
"git log -p -S" now looks for the after applying the textconv filter (if defined); earlier it inspected the contents of the blobs without filtering.
"git format-patch" learned the "--notes=" option to give notes for the commit after the three-dash lines in its output.
"git log --grep=" learned to honor the "grep.patterntype" configuration set to "perl".
"git replace -d " now interprets as an extended SHA-1 (e.g. HEAD~4 is allowed), instead of only accepting full hex object name.
"git rm $submodule" used to punt on removing a submodule working tree to avoid losing the repository embedded in it. Because recent git uses a mechanism to separate the submodule repository from the submodule working tree, "git rm" learned to detect this case and removes the submodule working tree when it is safe to do so.
"git send-email" used to prompt for the sender address, even when the committer identity is well specified (e.g. via user.name and user.email configuration variables). The command no longer gives this prompt when not necessary.
"git send-email" did not allow non-address garbage strings to appear after addresses on Cc: lines in the patch files (and when told to pick them up to find more recipients).
"git submodule add" learned to add a new submodule at the same path as the path where an unrelated submodule was bound to in an existing revision via the "--name" option.
"git submodule sync" learned the "--recursive" option.
"diff.submodule" configuration variable can be used to give custom default value to the "git diff --submodule" option.
"git symbolic-ref" learned the "-d $symref" option to delete the named symbolic ref, which is more intuitive way to spell it than "update-ref -d --no-deref $symref".
Foreign Interface:
"git cvsimport" can be told to record timezones (other than GMT) per-author via its author info file.
The remote helper interface to interact with subversion repositories (one of the GSoC 2012 projects) has been merged.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc:
Compilation on Cygwin with newer header files are supported now.
The logic to generate the initial advertisement from "upload-pack" (i.e. what is invoked by "git fetch" on the other side of the connection) to list what refs are available in the repository has been optimized.
The logic to find set of attributes that match a given path has been optimized.
Use preloadindex in "git diff-index" and "git update-index", which has a nice speedup on systems with slow stat calls (and even on Linux).
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE 1.8.0:
The configuration parser had an unnecessary hardcoded limit on variable names that was not checked consistently. (merge 0971e99 bw/config-lift-variable-name-length-limit later to maint).
The "say" function in the test scaffolding incorrectly allowed "echo" to interpret "\a" as if it were a C-string asking for a BEL output. (merge 7bc0911 jc/test-say-color-avoid-echo-escape later to maint).
"git mergetool" feeds /dev/null as a common ancestor when dealing with an add/add conflict, but p4merge backend cannot handle it. Work it around by passing a temporary empty file. (merge 3facc60 da/mergetools-p4 later to maint).
"git log -F -E --grep=''" failed to use the given pattern as extended regular expression, and instead looked for the string literally. (merge 727b6fc jc/grep-pcre-loose-ends~1 later to maint).
"git grep -e pattern " asked the attribute system to read ":.gitattributes" file in the working tree, which was nonsense. (merge 55c6168 nd/grep-true-path later to maint).
A symbolic ref refs/heads/SYM was not correctly removed with "git branch -d SYM"; the command removed the ref pointed by SYM instead. (merge 13baa9f rs/branch-del-symref later to maint).
Update "remote tracking branch" in the documentation to "remote-tracking branch". (merge a6d3bde mm/maint-doc-remote-tracking later to maint).
"git pull --rebase" run while the HEAD is detached tried to find the upstream branch of the detached HEAD (which by definition does not exist) and emitted unnecessary error messages. (merge e980765 ph/pull-rebase-detached later to maint).
The refs/replace hierarchy was not mentioned in the repository-layout docs. (merge 11fbe18 po/maint-refs-replace-docs later to maint).
Various rfc2047 quoting issues around a non-ASCII name on the From: line in the output from format-patch have been corrected. (merge 25dc8da js/format-2047 later to maint).
Sometimes curl_multi_timeout() function suggested a wrong timeout value when there is no file descriptor to wait on and the http transport ended up sleeping for minutes in select(2) system call. A workaround has been added for this. (merge 7202b81 sz/maint-curl-multi-timeout later to maint).
For a fetch refspec (or the result of applying wildcard on one), we always want the RHS to map to something inside "refs/" hierarchy, but the logic to check it was not exactly right. (merge 5c08c1f jc/maint-fetch-tighten-refname-check later to maint).
"git diff -G" did not honor textconv filter when looking for changes. (merge b1c2f57 jk/maint-diff-grep-textconv later to maint).
Some HTTP servers ask for auth only during the actual packing phase (not in ls-remote phase); this is not really a recommended configuration, but the clients used to fail to authenticate with such servers. (merge 2e736fd jk/maint-http-half-auth-fetch later to maint).
"git p4" used to try expanding malformed "$keyword$" that spans across multiple lines. (merge 6b2bf41 pw/maint-p4-rcs-expansion-newline later to maint).
Syntax highlighting in "gitweb" was not quite working. (merge 048b399 rh/maint-gitweb-highlight-ext later to maint).
RSS feed from "gitweb" had a xss hole in its title output. (merge 0f0ecf6 jk/maint-gitweb-xss later to maint).
"git config --path $key" segfaulted on "[section] key" (a boolean "true" spelled without "=", not "[section] key = true"). (merge 962c38e cn/config-missing-path later to maint).
"git checkout -b foo" while on an unborn branch did not say "Switched to a new branch 'foo'" like other cases. (merge afa8c07 jk/checkout-out-of-unborn later to maint).
We failed to mention a file without any content change but whose permission bit was modified, or (worse yet) a new file without any content in the "git diff --stat" output. (merge de9095955 lt/diff-stat-show-0-lines later to maint).
When "--stat-count" hides a diffstat for binary contents, the total number of added and removed lines at the bottom was computed incorrectly. (merge de9095955 lt/diff-stat-show-0-lines later to maint).
When "--stat-count" hides a diffstat for unmerged paths, the total number of affected files at the bottom of the "diff --stat" output was computed incorrectly. (merge de9095955 lt/diff-stat-show-0-lines later to maint).
"diff --shortstat" miscounted the total number of affected files when there were unmerged paths. (merge de9095955 lt/diff-stat-show-0-lines later to maint).
"update-ref -d --deref SYM" to delete a ref through a symbolic ref that points to it did not remove it correctly. (merge b274a71 jh/update-ref-d-through-symref later to maint).

New in Git 1.8.0.1 (Nov 26, 2012)

Fixes:
The configuration parser had an unnecessary hardcoded limit on variable names that was not checked consistently.
The "say" function in the test scaffolding incorrectly allowed "echo" to interpret "\a" as if it were a C-string asking for a BEL output.
"git mergetool" feeds /dev/null as a common ancestor when dealing with an add/add conflict, but p4merge backend cannot handle it. Work it around by passing a temporary empty file.
"git log -F -E --grep=''" failed to use the given pattern as extended regular expression, and instead looked for the string literally.
"git grep -e pattern " asked the attribute system to read ":.gitattributes" file in the working tree, which was nonsense.
A symbolic ref refs/heads/SYM was not correctly removed with "git branch -d SYM"; the command removed the ref pointed by SYM instead.
Earlier we fixed documentation to hyphenate "remote-tracking branch" to clarify that these are not a remote entity, but unhyphenated spelling snuck in to a few places since then.
"git pull --rebase" run while the HEAD is detached tried to find the upstream branch of the detached HEAD (which by definition does not exist) and emitted unnecessary error messages.
The refs/replace hierarchy was not mentioned in the repository-layout docs.
Sometimes curl_multi_timeout() function suggested a wrong timeout value when there is no file descriptors to wait on and the http transport ended up sleeping for minutes in select(2) system call. A workaround has been added for this.
Various rfc2047 quoting issues around a non-ASCII name on the From: line in the output from format-patch have been corrected.
"git diff -G" did not honor textconv filter when looking for changes.
Bash completion script (in contrib/) did not correctly complete a lazy "git checkout $name_of_remote_tracking_branch_that_is_unique" command line.
RSS feed from "gitweb" had a xss hole in its title output.
"git config --path $key" segfaulted on "[section] key" (a boolean "true" spelled without "=", not "[section] key = true").
"git checkout -b foo" while on an unborn branch did not say "Switched to a new branch 'foo'" like other cases.
Also contains other minor fixes and documentation updates.

New in Git 1.8.0 (Oct 22, 2012)

UPDATES SINCE V1.7.12:
UI, Workflows & Features:
A credential helper for Win32 to allow access to the keychain of the logged-in user has been added.
An initial port to HP NonStop.
A credential helper to allow access to the Gnome keyring has been added.
When "git am" sanitizes the "Subject:" line, we strip the prefix from "Re: subject" and also from a less common "re: subject", but left the even less common "RE: subject" intact. Now we strip that too.
It was tempting to say "git branch --set-upstream origin/master", but that tells Git to arrange the local branch "origin/master" to integrate with the currently checked out branch, which is highly unlikely what the user meant. The option is deprecated; use the new "--set-upstream-to" (with a short-and-sweet "-u") option instead.
"git cherry-pick" learned the "--allow-empty-message" option to allow it to replay a commit without any log message.
After "git cherry-pick -s" gave control back to the user asking help to resolve conflicts, concluding "git commit" used to need to be run with "-s" if the user wants to sign it off; now the command leaves the sign-off line in the log template.
"git daemon" learned the "--access-hook" option to allow an external command to decline service based on the client address, repository path, etc.
"git difftool --dir-diff" learned to use symbolic links to prepare a temporary copy of the working tree when available.
"git grep" learned to use a non-standard pattern type by default if a configuration variable tells it to.
Accumulated updates to "git gui" has been merged.
"git log -g" learned the "--grep-reflog=" option to limit its output to commits with a reflog message that matches the given pattern.
"git merge-base" learned the "--is-ancestor A B" option to tell if A is an ancestor of B. The result is indicated by its exit status code.
"git mergetool" now allows users to override the actual command used with the mergetool.$name.cmd configuration variable even for built-in mergetool backends.
"git rebase -i" learned the "--edit-todo" option to open an editor to edit the instruction sheet.
Foreign Interface:
"git svn" has been updated to work with SVN 1.7.
"git p4" learned the "--conflicts" option to specify what to do when encountering a conflict during "p4 submit".
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.:
Git ships with a fall-back regexp implementation for platforms with buggy regexp library, but it was easy for people to keep using their platform regexp by mistake. A new test has been added to check this.
The "check-docs" build target has been updated and greatly simplified.
The test suite is run under MALLOC_CHECK_ when running with a glibc that supports the feature.
The documentation in the TeXinfo format was using indented output for materials meant to be examples that are better typeset in monospace.
Compatibility wrapper around some mkdir(2) implementations that reject parameters with trailing slash has been introduced.
Compatibility wrapper for systems that lack usable setitimer() has been added.
The option parsing of "git checkout" had error checking, dwim and defaulting missing options, all mixed in the code, and issuing an appropriate error message with useful context was getting harder. The code has been reorganized to allow giving a proper diagnosis when the user says "git checkout -b -t foo bar" (e.g. "-t" is not a good name for a branch).
Many internal uses of a "git merge-base" equivalent were only to see if one commit fast-forwards to the other, which did not need the full set of merge bases to be computed. They have been updated to use less expensive checks.
The heuristics to detect and silently convert latin1 to utf8 when we were told to use utf-8 in the log message has been transplanted from "mailinfo" to "commit" and "commit-tree".
Messages given by "git -h" from many subcommands have been marked for translation.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V1.7.12:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.12 in the
maintenance track are contained in this release (see release notes
to them for details).
The attribute system may be asked for a path that itself or its leading directories no longer exists in the working tree, and it is fine if we cannot open .gitattribute file in such a case. Failure to open per-directory .gitattributes with error status other than ENOENT and ENOTDIR should be diagnosed, but it wasn't.
When looking for $HOME/.gitconfig etc., it is OK if we cannot read them because they do not exist, but we did not diagnose existing files that we cannot read.
When "git am" is fed an input that has multiple "Content-type: ..." header, it did not grok charset= attribute correctly.
"git am" mishandled a patch attached as application/octet-stream (e.g. not text/*); Content-Transfer-Encoding (e.g. base64) was not honored correctly.
"git blame MAKEFILE" run in a history that has "Makefile" but not "MAKEFILE" should say "No such file MAKEFILE in HEAD", but got confused on a case insensitive filesystem and failed to do so.
Even during a conflicted merge, "git blame $path" always meant to blame uncommitted changes to the "working tree" version; make it more useful by showing cleanly merged parts as coming from the other branch that is being merged.
It was unclear in the documentation for "git blame" that it is unnecessary for users to use the "--follow" option.
Output from "git branch -v" contains "(no branch)" that could be localized, but the code to align it along with the names of branches was counting in bytes, not in display columns.
"git cherry-pick A C B" used to replay changes in A and then B and then C if these three commits had committer timestamps in that order, which is not what the user who said "A C B" naturally expects.
A repository created with "git clone --single" had its fetch refspecs set up just like a clone without "--single", leading the subsequent "git fetch" to slurp all the other branches, defeating the whole point of specifying "only this branch".
Documentation talked about "first line of commit log" when it meant the title of the commit. The description was clarified by defining how the title is decided and rewording the casual mention of "first line" to "title".
"git cvsimport" did not thoroughly cleanse tag names that it inferred from the names of the tags it obtained from CVS, which caused "git tag" to barf and stop the import in the middle.
Earlier we made the diffstat summary line that shows the number of lines added/deleted localizable, but it was found irritating having to see them in various languages on a list whose discussion language is English, and this change has been reverted.
"git fetch --all", when passed "--no-tags", did not honor the "--no-tags" option while fetching from individual remotes (the same issue existed with "--tags", but the combination "--all --tags" makes much less sense than "--all --no-tags").
"git fetch" over http had an old workaround for an unlikely server misconfiguration; it turns out that this hurts debuggability of the configuration in general, and has been reverted.
"git fetch" over http advertised that it supports "deflate", which is much less common, and did not advertise the more common "gzip" on its Accept-Encoding header.
"git fetch" over the dumb-http revision walker could segfault when curl's multi interface was used.
"git gc --auto" notified the user that auto-packing has triggered even under the "--quiet" option.
After "gitk" showed the contents of a tag, neither "Reread references" nor "Reload" updated what is shown as the contents of it when the user overwrote the tag with "git tag -f".
"git log --all-match --grep=A --grep=B" ought to show commits that mention both A and B, but when these three options are used with --author or --committer, it showed commits that mention either A or B (or both) instead.
The "-Xours" backend option to "git merge -s recursive" was ignored for binary files.
"git p4", when "--use-client-spec" and "--detect-branches" are used together, misdetected branches.
"git receive-pack" (the counterpart to "git push") did not give progress output while processing objects it received to the puser when run over the smart-http protocol.
When you misspell the command name you give to the "exec" action in the "git rebase -i" instruction sheet you were told that 'rebase' is not a git subcommand from "git rebase --continue".
The subcommand in "git remote" to remove a defined remote was "rm" and the command did not take a fully-spelled "remove".
The interactive prompt that "git send-email" gives was error prone. It asked "What e-mail address do you want to use?" with the address it guessed (correctly) the user would want to use in its prompt, tempting the user to say "y". But the response was taken as "No, please use 'y' as the e-mail address instead", which is most certainly not what the user meant.
"git show --format='%ci'" did not give the timestamp correctly for commits created without human readable name on the "committer" line.
"git show --quiet" ought to be a synonym for "git show -s", but wasn't.
"git submodule frotz" was not diagnosed as "frotz" being an unknown subcommand to "git submodule"; the user instead got a complaint that "git submodule status" was run with an unknown path "frotz".
"git status" honored the ignore=dirty settings in .gitmodules but "git commit" didn't.
"gitweb" did not give the correct committer timezone in its feed output due to a typo.

New in Git 1.7.12.4 (Oct 18, 2012)

New in Git 1.8.0 RC 2 (Oct 12, 2012)

In the next major release (not the 1.8.0 release, but the one that follows it, perhaps 1.9 or 2.0), we will change the behavior of the "git push" command. When "git push [$there]" does not say what to push, we have traditionally used the "matching" semantics (all your branches were sent to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name over there). We will use the "simple" semantics, that pushes the current branch to the branch with the same name but only when the current branch is set to integrate with that remote branch.
There is a user preference configuration variable "push.default" to change this, and in 1.8.0 release, "git push" will start warning qabout the upcoming change until you set this variable.
When "git am" is fed an input that has multiple "Content-type: ..." header, it did not grok charset= attribute correctly. It also mishandled a patch attached as application/octet-stream (e.g. not text/*); Content-Transfer-Encoding (e.g. base64) was not honored correctly.
Even during a conflicted merge, "git blame $path" always meant to blame uncommitted changes to the working tree version. The command has been updated to show cleanly merged parts as coming from the other branch that is being merged.
"git branch --set-upstream" is deprecated and may be removed in a relatively distant future. "git branch [-u|--set-upstream-to]" has been introduced with a saner order of arguments.
"git cherry-pick A C B" used to replay changes in A and then B and then C if these three commits had committer timestamps in that order; now it replays them in the order the user told it to, i.e. "A C B", which is what the user naturally expects.
A repository created with "git clone --single" had its fetch refspecs set up just like a clone without "--single", leading the subsequent "git fetch" to slurp all the other branches, defeating the whole point of specifying "only this branch" in the first place.
"git log --all-match --grep=A --grep=B" ought to show commits that mention both A and B but when these three options are used with --author or --committer, it showed commits that mention either A or B (or both) instead; this has been fixed.
"git log -g" can be given "--grep-reflog=pattern" option to look for entries with strings that match the given pattern.
The "-Xours" (and "-Xtheirs") backend option to "git merge -s recursive" now takes effect even on binary files.
The sub-command in "git remote" to remove a defined remote was "rm" and the command did not take a fully-spelled "remove".
The interactive prompt "git send-email" gives was error prone. It asked "What e-mail address do you want to use?" with the address it guessed (correctly) the user would want to use in its prompt, tempting the user to say "y". But the response was taken as "No, please use 'y' as my e-mail address instead", which is most certainly not what the user meant; the command asks for confirmation in such a case now.

New in Git 1.7.12.3 (Oct 9, 2012)

New in Git 1.8.0 RC 0 (Oct 2, 2012)

In the next major release, 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 (all your branches were sent to the remote as long as there already are branches of the same name over there). We will use the "simple" semantics, that pushes the current branch to the branch with the same name only when the current branch is set to integrate with that remote branch. There is a user preference configuration variable "push.default" to change this, and "git push" will warn about the upcoming change until you set this variable.
"git branch --set-upstream" is deprecated and may be removed in a relatively distant future. "git branch [-u|--set-upstream-to]" has been introduced with a saner order of arguments.
The "-Xours" (and "-Xtheirs") backend option to "git merge -s recursive" now takes effect even on binary files.
Even during a conflicted merge, "git blame $path" always meant to blame uncommitted changes to the working tree version. The command has been updated to show cleanly merged parts as coming from the other branch that is being merged.
"git cherry-pick A C B" used to replay changes in A and then B and then C if these three commits had committer timestamps in that order; now it replays them in the order the user told it to, i.e. "A C B", which is what the user naturally expects.
"git log --all-match --grep=A --grep=B" ought to show commits that mention both A and B but when these three options are used with --author or --committer, it showed commits that mention either A or B (or both) instead; this has been fixed.
The interactive prompt "git send-email" gives was error prone. It asked "What e-mail address do you want to use?" with the address it guessed (correctly) the user would want to use in its prompt, tempting the user to say "y". But the response was taken as "No, please use 'y' as my e-mail address instead", which is most certainly not what the user meant; the command asks for confirmation in such a case now.

New in Git 1.7.12.2 (Oct 1, 2012)

New in Git 1.7.12.1 (Sep 19, 2012)

Fixes since v1.7.12:
"git apply -p0" did not parse pathnames on "diff --git" line correctly. This caused patches that had pathnames in no other places to be mistakenly rejected (most notably, binary patch that does not rename nor change mode). Textual patches, renames or mode changes have preimage and postimage pathnames in different places in a form that can be parsed unambiguously and did not suffer from this problem.
"git cherry-pick A C B" used to replay changes in A and then B and then C if these three commits had committer timestamps in that order, which is not what the user who said "A C B" naturally expects.
"git commit --amend" let the user edit the log message and then died when the human-readable committer name was given insufficiently by getpwent(3).
Some capabilities were asked by fetch-pack even when upload-pack did not advertise that they are available. fetch-pack has been fixed not to do so.
"git diff" had a confusion between taking data from a path in the working tree and taking data from an object that happens to have name 0{40} recorded in a tree.
"git for-each-ref" did not correctly support more than one --sort option.
"git log .." errored out saying it is both rev range and a path when there is no disambiguating "--" is on the command line. Update the command line parser to interpret ".." as a path in such a case.
The "--topo-order", "--date-order" (and the lack of either means the default order) options to "rev-list" and "log" family of commands were poorly described in the documentation.
"git prune" without "-v" used to warn about leftover temporary files (which is an indication of an earlier aborted operation).
Pushing to smart HTTP server with recent Git fails without having the username in the URL to force authentication, if the server is configured to allow GET anonymously, while requiring authentication for POST.
The reflog entries left by "git rebase" and "git rebase -i" were inconsistent (the interactive one gave an abbreviated object name).
When "git push" triggered the automatic gc on the receiving end, a message from "git prune" that said it was removing cruft leaked to the standard output, breaking the communication protocol.
"git show --quiet" ought to be a synonym for "git show -s", but wasn't.
"git show --format='%ci'" did not give timestamp correctly for commits created without human readable name on "committer" line.
"git send-email" did not unquote encoded words that appear on the header correctly, and lost "_" from strings.
The interactive prompt "git send-email" gives was error prone. It asked "What e-mail address do you want to use?" with the address it guessed (correctly) the user would want to use in its prompt, tempting the user to say "y". But the response was taken as "No, please use 'y' as the e-mail address instead", which is most certainly not what the user meant.
"gitweb" when used with PATH_INFO failed to notice directories with SP (and other characters that need URL-style quoting) in them.
When the user gives an argument that can be taken as both a revision name and a pathname without disambiguating with "--", we used to give a help message "Use '--' to separate". The message has been clarified to show where that '--' goes on the command line.
When the user exports a non-default IFS without HT, scripts that rely on being able to parse "ls-files -s | while read a b c..." started to fail. Protect them from such a misconfiguration.
The attribute system may be asked for a path that itself or its leading directories no longer exists in the working tree, and it is fine if we cannot open .gitattribute file in such a case. Failure to open per-directory .gitattributes with error status other than ENOENT and ENOTDIR should be diagnosed, but it wasn't.
After "gitk" showed the contents of a tag, neither "Reread references" nor "Reload" did not update what is shown as the contents of it, when the user overwrote the tag with "git tag -f".
"ciabot" script (in contrib/) has been updated with extensive documentation.
"git-jump" script (in contrib/) did not work well when diff.noprefix or diff.mnemonicprefix is in effect.
Older parts of the documentation described as if having a regular file in .git/refs/ hierarchy were the only way to have branches and tags, which is not true for quite some time.
A utility shell function test_seq has been added as a replacement for the 'seq' utility found on some platforms.
Compatibility wrapper to learn the maximum number of file descriptors we can open around sysconf(_SC_OPEN_MAX) and getrlimit(RLIMIT_NO_FILE) has been introduced for portability.
We used curl_easy_strerror() without checking version of cURL, breaking the build for versions before curl 7.12.0.
Code to work around MacOS X UTF-8 gotcha has been cleaned up.
Fallback 'getpass' implementation made unportable use of stdio API.
The "--rebase" option to "git pull" can be abbreviated to "-r", but we didn't document it.
It was generally understood that "--long-option"s to many of our subcommands can be abbreviated to the unique prefix, but it was not easy to find it described for new readers of the documentation set.
The synopsis said "checkout [-B branch]" to make it clear the branch name is a parameter to the option, but the heading for the option description was "-B::", not "-B branch::", making the documentation misleading.
Also contains numerous documentation updates.

New in Git 1.7.12 (Aug 30, 2012)

Updates since v1.7.11:
UI, Workflows & Features:
Git can be told to normalize pathnames it read from readdir(3) and all arguments it got from the command line into precomposed UTF-8 (assuming that they come as decomposed UTF-8), in order to work around issues on Mac OS.
I think there still are other places that need conversion (e.g. paths that are read from stdin for some commands), but this should be a good first step in the right direction.
Per-user $HOME/.gitconfig file can optionally be stored in $HOME/.config/git/config instead, which is in line with XDG.
The value of core.attributesfile and core.excludesfile default to $HOME/.config/git/attributes and $HOME/.config/git/ignore respectively when these files exist.
Logic to disambiguate abbreviated object names have been taught to take advantage of object types that are expected in the context, e.g. XXXXXX in the "git describe" output v1.2.3-gXXXXXX must be a commit object, not a blob nor a tree. This will help us prolong the lifetime of abbreviated object names.
"git apply" learned to wiggle the base version and perform three-way merge when a patch does not exactly apply to the version you have.
Scripted Porcelain writers now have access to the credential API via the "git credential" plumbing command.
"git help" used to always default to "man" format even on platforms where "man" viewer is not widely available.
"git clone --local $path" started its life as an experiment to optionally use link/copy when cloning a repository on the disk, but we didn't deprecate it after we made the option a no-op to always use the optimization. The command learned "--no-local" option to turn this off, as a more explicit alternative over use of file:// URL.
"git fetch" and friends used to say "remote side hung up unexpectedly" when they failed to get response they expect from the other side, but one common reason why they don't get expected response is that the remote repository does not exist or cannot be read. The error message in this case was updated to give better hints to the user.
"git help -w $cmd" can show HTML version of documentation for "git-$cmd" by setting help.htmlpath to somewhere other than the default location where the build procedure installs them locally; the variable can even point at a http:// URL.
"git rebase [-i] --root $tip" can now be used to rewrite all the history leading to "$tip" down to the root commit.
"git rebase -i" learned "-x " to insert "exec " after each commit in the resulting history.
"git status" gives finer classification to various states of paths in conflicted state and offer advice messages in its output.
"git submodule" learned to deal with nested submodule structure where a module is contained within a module whose origin is specified as a relative URL to its superproject's origin.
A rather heavy-ish "git completion" script has been split to create a separate "git prompting" script, to help lazy-autoloading of the completion part while making prompting part always available.
"gitweb" pays attention to various forms of credits that are similar to "Signed-off-by:" lines in the commit objects and highlights them accordingly.
Foreign Interface:
"mediawiki" remote helper (in contrib/) learned to handle file attachments.
"git p4" now uses "Jobs:" and "p4 move" when appropriate.
vcs-svn has been updated to clean-up compilation, lift 32-bit limitations, etc.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. (please report possible regressions):
Some tests showed false failures caused by a bug in ecryptofs.
We no longer use AsciiDoc7 syntax in our documentation and favor a more modern style.
"git am --rebasing" codepath was taught to grab authorship, log message and the patch text directly out of existing commits. This will help rebasing commits that have confusing "diff" output in their log messages.
"git index-pack" and "git pack-objects" use streaming API to read from the object store to avoid having to hold a large blob object in-core while they are doing their thing.
Code to match paths with exclude patterns learned to avoid calling fnmatch() by comparing fixed leading substring literally when possible.
"git log -n 1 -- rarely-touched-path" was spending unnecessary cycles after showing the first change to find the next one, only to discard it.
"git svn" got a large-looking code reorganization at the last minute before the code freeze.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes since v1.7.11:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.11 in the maintenance
releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).
"git submodule add" was confused when the superproject did not have its repository in its usual place in the working tree and GIT_DIR and GIT_WORK_TREE was used to access it.
"git commit --amend" let the user edit the log message and then died when the human-readable committer name was given insufficiently by getpwent(3).

New in Git 1.7.11.4 (Jul 31, 2012)

New in Git 1.7.12 RC 0 (Jul 24, 2012)

UPDATES SINCE V1.7.11:
UI, Workflows & Features:
Git can be told to normalize pathnames it read from readdir(3) and all arguments it got from the command line into precomposed UTF-8 (assuming that they come as decomposed UTF-8), in order to work around issues on Mac OS.
I think there still are other places that need conversion (e.g. paths that are read from stdin for some commands), but this should be a good first step in the right direction.
Per-user $HOME/.gitconfig file can optionally be stored in $HOME/.config/git/config instead, which is in line with XDG.
The value of core.attributesfile and core.excludesfile default to $HOME/.config/attributes and $HOME/.config/ignore respectively when these files exist.
Logic to disambiguate abbreviated object names have been taught to take advantage of object types that are expected in the context, e.g. XXXXXX in the "git describe" output v1.2.3-gXXXXXX must be a commit object, not a blob nor a tree. This will help us prolong the lifetime of abbreviated object names.
"git apply" learned to wiggle the base version and perform three-way merge when a patch does not exactly apply to the version you have.
Scripted Porcelain writers now have access to the credential API via the "git credential" plumbing command.
"git help" used to always default to "man" format even on platforms where "man" viewer is not widely available.
"git clone --local $path" started its life as an experiment to optionally use link/copy when cloning a repository on the disk, but we didn't deprecate it after we made the option a no-op to always use the optimization. The command learned "--no-local" option to turn this off, as a more explicit alternative over use of file:// URL.
"git fetch" and friends used to say "remote side hung up unexpectedly" when they failed to get response they expect from the other side, but one common reason why they don't get expected response is that the remote repository does not exist or cannot be read. The error message in this case was updated to give better hints to the user.
git native protocol agents learned to show software version over the wire, so that the server log can be examined to see the vintage distribution of clients.
"git help -w $cmd" can show HTML version of documentation for "git-$cmd" by setting help.htmlpath to somewhere other than the default location where the build procedure installs them locally; the variable can even point at a http:// URL.
"git rebase [-i] --root $tip" can now be used to rewrite all the history leading to "$tip" down to the root commit.
"git rebase -i" learned "-x " to insert "exec " after each commit in the resulting history.
"git status" gives finer classification to various states of paths in conflicted state and offer advice messages in its output.
"git submodule" learned to deal with nested submodule structure where a module is contained within a module whose origin is specified as a relative URL to its superproject's origin.
A rather heavy-ish "git completion" script has been split to create a separate "git prompting" script, to help lazy-autoloading of the completion part while making prompting part always available.
"gitweb" pays attention to various forms of credits that are similar to "Signed-off-by:" lines in the commit objects and highlights them accordingly.
Foreign Interface:
"mediawiki" remote helper (in contrib/) learned to handle file attachments.
"git p4" now uses "Jobs:" and "p4 move" when appropriate.
vcs-svn has been updated to clean-up compilation, lift 32-bit limitations, etc.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc. (please report possible regressions):
Some tests showed false failures caused by a bug in ecryptofs.
We no longer use AsciiDoc7 syntax in our documentation and favor a more modern style.
"git am --rebasing" codepath was taught to grab authorship, log message and the patch text directly out of existing commits. This will help rebasing commits that have confusing "diff" output in their log messages.
"git index-pack" and "git pack-objects" use streaming API to read from the object store to avoid having to hold a large blob object in-core while they are doing their thing.
Code to match paths with exclude patterns learned to avoid calling fnmatch() by comparing fixed leading substring literally when possible.
"git log -n 1 -- rarely-touched-path" was spending unnecessary cycles after showing the first change to find the next one, only to discard it.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V1.7.11:
Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.11 in the maintenance
releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
details).
"git commit-tree" learned a more natural "-p " order of arguments long time ago, but recently forgot it by mistake. (merge 4b7518a kk/maint-commit-tree later to maint).
"git diff --no-ext-diff" did not output anything for a typechange filepair when GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF is in effect. (merge c12f82a jv/maint-no-ext-diff later to maint).
When "git am" failed, old timers knew to check .git/rebase-apply/patch to see what went wrong, but we never told the users about it. (merge 14bf2d5 pg/maint-1.7.9-am-where-is-patch later to maint).
When "git submodule add" clones a submodule repository, it can get confused where to store the resulting submodule repository in the superproject's .git/ directory when there is a symbolic link in the path to the current directory. (merge 6eafa6d jl/maint-1.7.10-recurse-submodules-with-symlink later to maint).
In 1.7.9 era, we taught "git rebase" about the raw timestamp format but we did not teach the same trick to "filter-branch", which rolled a similar logic on its own. (merge 44b85e89 jc/maint-filter-branch-epoch-date later to maint).

New in Git 1.7.11.3 (Jul 23, 2012)

New in Git 1.7.11.2 (Jul 12, 2012)

Fixes since v1.7.11.1:
On Cygwin, the platform pread(2) is not thread safe, just like our own compat/ emulation, and cannot be used in the index-pack program. Makefile variable NO_THREAD_SAFE_PREAD can be defined to avoid use of this function in a threaded program.
"git add" allows adding a regular file to the path where a submodule used to exist, but "git update-index" does not allow an equivalent operation to Porcelain writers.
"git archive" incorrectly computed the header checksum; the symptom was observed only when using pathnames with hi-bit set.
"git blame" did not try to make sure that the abbreviated commit object names in its output are unique.
Running "git bundle verify" on a bundle that records a complete history said "it requires these 0 commits".
"git clone --single-branch" to clone a single branch did not limit the cloning to the specified branch.
"git diff --no-index" did not correctly handle relative paths and did not correctly give exit codes when run under "--quiet" option.
"git diff --no-index" did not work with pagers correctly.
"git diff COPYING HEAD:COPYING" gave a nonsense error message that claimed that the treeish HEAD did not have COPYING in it.
When "git log" gets "--simplify-merges/by-decoration" together with "--first-parent", the combination of these options makes the simplification logic to use in-core commit objects that haven't been examined for relevance, either producing incorrect result or taking too long to produce any output. Teach the simplification logic to ignore commits that the first-parent traversal logic ignored when both are in effect to work around the issue.
"git ls-files --exclude=t -i" did not consider anything under t/ as excluded, as it did not pay attention to exclusion of leading paths while walking the index. Other two users of excluded() are also updated.
"git request-pull $url dev" when the tip of "dev" branch was tagged with "ext4-for-linus" used the contents from the tag in the output but still asked the "dev" branch to be pulled, not the tag.
Also contains minor typofixes and documentation updates.

New in Git 1.7.11.1 (Jun 22, 2012)

New in Git 1.7.11 (Jun 18, 2012)

UI, Workflows & Features:
A new mode for push, "simple", which is a cross between "current" and "upstream", has been introduced. "git push" without any refspec will push the current branch out to the same name at the remote repository only when it is set to track the branch with the same name over there. The plan is to make this mode the new default value when push.default is not configured.
A couple of commands learned the "--column" option to produce columnar output.
A third-party tool "git subtree" is distributed in contrib/
A remote helper that acts as a proxy and caches ssl session for the https:// transport is added to the contrib/ area.
Error messages given when @{u} is used for a branch without its upstream configured have been clarified.
Even with the "-q"uiet option, "checkout" used to report setting up tracking. Also "branch" learned the "-q"uiet option to squelch informational message.
Your build platform may support hardlinks but you may prefer not to use them, e.g. when installing to DESTDIR to make a tarball and untarring on a filesystem that has poor support for hardlinks. There is a Makefile option NO_INSTALL_HARDLINKS for you.
The smart-http backend used to always override GIT_COMMITTER_* variables with REMOTE_USER and REMOTE_ADDR, but these variables are now preserved when set.
"git am" learned the "--include" option, which is an opposite of existing the "--exclude" option.
When "git am -3" needs to fall back to an application of the patch to a synthesized preimage followed by a 3-way merge, the paths that needed such treatment are now reported to the end user, so that the result in them can be eyeballed with extra care.
The output from "diff/log --stat" used to always allocate 4 columns to show the number of modified lines, but not anymore.
"git difftool" learned the "--dir-diff" option to spawn external diff tools that can compare two directory hierarchies at a time after populating two temporary directories, instead of running an instance of the external tool once per a file pair.
The "fmt-merge-msg" command learned to list the primary contributors involved in the side topic you are merging in a comment in the merge commit template.
"git rebase" learned to optionally keep commits that do not introduce any change in the original history.
"git push --recurse-submodules" learned to optionally look into the histories of submodules bound to the superproject and push them out.
A 'snapshot' request to "gitweb" honors If-Modified-Since: header, based on the commit date.
"gitweb" learned to highlight the patch it outputs even more.
Foreign Interface:
"git svn" used to die with unwanted SIGPIPE when talking with an HTTP server that uses keep-alive.
"git svn" learned to use platform specific authentication providers, e.g. gnome-keyring, kwallet, etc.
"git p4" has been moved out of the contrib/ area and has seen more work on importing labels as tags from (and exporting tags as labels to) p4.
Performance and Internal Implementation (please report possible regressions):
Bash completion script (in contrib/) have been cleaned up to make future work on it simpler.
An experimental "version 4" format of the index file has been introduced to reduce on-disk footprint and I/O overhead.
"git archive" learned to produce its output without reading the blob object it writes out in memory in its entirety.
"git index-pack" that runs when fetching or pushing objects to complete the packfile on the receiving end learned to use multiple threads to do its job when available.
The code to compute hash values for lines used by the internal diff engine was optimized on little-endian machines, using the same trick the kernel folks came up with.
"git apply" had some memory leaks plugged.
Setting up a revision traversal with many starting points was inefficient as these were placed in a date-order priority queue one-by-one. Now they are collected in the queue unordered first, and sorted immediately before getting used.
More lower-level commands learned to use the streaming API to read from the object store without keeping everything in core.
The weighting parameters to suggestion command name typo have been tweaked, so that "git tags" will suggest "tag?" and not "stage?".
Because "sh" on the user's PATH may be utterly broken on some systems, run-command API now uses SHELL_PATH, not /bin/sh, when spawning an external command (not applicable to Windows port).
The API to iterate over the refs/ hierarchy has been tweaked to allow walking only a subset of it more efficiently.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes since v1.7.10:
"git submodule init" used to report "registered for path ..." even for submodules that were registered earlier. (cherry-pick c1c259e jl/submodule-report-new-path-once later to maint).
"git diff --stat" used to fully count a binary file with modified execution bits whose contents is unmodified, which was not quite right.

New in Git 1.7.10.4 (Jun 4, 2012)

New in Git 1.7.11 RC 0 (May 30, 2012)

UPDATES SINCE V1.7.10:
UI, Workflows & Features:
A new mode for push, "simple", which is a cross between "current" and "upstream", has been introduced. "git push" without any refspec will push the current branch out to the same name at the remote repository only when it is set to track the branch with the same name over there. The plan is to make this mode the new default value when push.default is not configured.
A couple of commands learned the "--column" option to produce columnar output.
A third-party tool "git subtree" is distributed in contrib/
Error messages given when @{u} is used for a branch without its upstream configured have been clatified.
Even with "-q"uiet option, "checkout" used to report setting up tracking. Also "branch" learned the "-q"uiet option to squelch informational message.
Your build platform may support hardlinks but you may prefer not to use them, e.g. when installing to DESTDIR to make a tarball and untarring on a filesystem that has poor support for hardlinks. There is a Makefile option NO_INSTALL_HARDLINKS for you.
The smart-http backend used to always override GIT_COMMITTER_* variables with REMOTE_USER and REMOTE_ADDR, but these variables are now preserved when set.
"git am" learned the "--include" option, which is an opposite of existing the "--exclude" option.
When "git am -3" needs to fall back to an application to a synthesized preimage followed by a 3-way merge, the paths that needed such treatment are now reported to the end user, so that the result in them can be eyeballed with extra care.
The output from "diff/log --stat" used to always allocate 4 columns to show the number of modified lines, but not anymore.
"git difftool" learned the "--dir-diff" option to spawn external diff tools that can compare two directory hierarchies at a time after populating two temporary directories, instead of running an instance of the external tool once per a file pair.
The "fmt-merge-msg" command learns to list the primary contributors involved in the side topic you are merging.
"git rebase" learned to optionally keep commits that do not introduce any change in the original history.
"git push --recurse-submodules" learned to optionally look into the histories of submodules bound to the superproject and push them out.
A 'snapshot' request to "gitweb" honors If-Modified-Since: header, based on the commit date.
"gitweb" learned to highlight the patch it outputs even more.
Foreign Interface:
"git svn" used to die with unwanted SIGPIPE when talking with HTTP server that uses keep-alive.
"git svn" learned to use platform specific authentication providers, e.g. gnome-keyring, kwallet, etc.
"git p4" has been moved out of contrib/ area and has seen more work on importing labels as tags from (and exporting tags as labels to) p4.
Performance and Internal Implementation (please report possible regressions):
Bash completion script (in contrib/) have been cleaned up to make future work on it simpler.
An experimental "version 4" format of the index file has been introduced to reduce on-disk footprint and I/O overhead.
"git archive" learned to produce its output without reading the blob object it writes out in memory in its entirety.
"git index-pack" that runs when fetching or pushing objects to complete the packfile on the receiving end learned to use multiple threads to do its job when available.
The code to compute hash values for lines used by the internal diff engine was optimized on little-endian machines, using the same trick the kernel folks came up with.
"git apply" had some memory leaks plugged.
Setting up a revision traversal with many starting points was inefficient as these were placed in a date-order priority queue one-by-one. Now they are collected in the queue unordered first, and sorted immediately before getting used.
More lower-level commands learned to use the streaming API to read from the object store without keeping everything in core.
Because "sh" on the user's PATH may be utterly broken on some systems, run-command API now uses SHELL_PATH, not /bin/sh, when spawning an external command (not applicable to Windows port).
The API to iterate over refs/ hierarchy has been tweaked to allow walking only a subset of it more efficiently.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
FIXES SINCE V1.7.10:
The progress indicator for a large "git checkout" was sent to stderr even if it is not a terminal. (merge e9fc64c ap/checkout-no-progress-for-non-tty later to maint).
A name taken from mailmap was copied into an internal buffer incorrectly and could overun the buffer if it is too long. (merge c9b4e9e jk/format-person-part-buffer-limit later to maint).
A malformed commit object that has a header line chomped in the middle could kill git with a NULL pointer dereference. (merge a9c7a8a jk/pretty-commit-header-incomplete-line later to maint).
An author/committer name that is a single character was mishandled as an invalid name by mistake. (merge d9955fd jk/ident-split-fix later to maint).
"git grep -e '$pattern'", unlike the case where the patterns are read from a file, did not treat individual lines in the given pattern argument as separate regular expressions as it should. (merge ec83061 rs/maint-grep-F later to maint).
"git diff --stat" used to fully count a binary file with modified execution bits whose contents is unmodified, which was not quite right.

New in Git 1.7.10.3 (May 30, 2012)

New in Git 1.7.10.2 (May 12, 2012)

Fixes since v1.7.10.1:
The test scaffolding for git-daemon was flaky.
The test scaffolding for fast-import was flaky.
The filesystem boundary was not correctly reported when .git directory discovery stopped at a mount point.
HTTP transport that requires authentication did not work correctly when multiple connections are used simultaneously.
Minor memory leak during unpack_trees (hence "merge" and "checkout" to check out another branch) has been plugged.
In the older days, the header "Conflicts:" in "cherry-pick" and "merge" was separated by a blank line from the list of paths that follow for readability, but when "merge" was rewritten in C, we lost it by mistake. Remove the newline from "cherry-pick" to make them match again.
The command line parser choked "git cherry-pick $name" when $name can be both revision name and a pathname, even though $name can never be a path in the context of the command.
The "include.path" facility in the configuration mechanism added in 1.7.10 forgot to interpret "~/path" and "~user/path" as it should.
"git config --rename-section" to rename an existing section into a bogus one did not check the new name.
The "diff --no-index" codepath used limited-length buffers, risking pathnames getting truncated. Update it to use the strbuf API.
The report from "git fetch" said "new branch" even for a non branch ref.
The http-backend (the server side of the smart http transfer) used to overwrite GIT_COMMITTER_NAME and GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL with the value obtained from REMOTE_USER unconditionally, making it impossible for the server side site-specific customization to use different identity sources to affect the names logged. It now uses REMOTE_USER only as a fallback value.
"log --graph" was not very friendly with "--stat" option and its output had line breaks at wrong places.
Octopus merge strategy did not reduce heads that are recorded in the final commit correctly.
"git push" over smart-http lost progress output a few releases ago; this release resurrects it.
The error and advice messages given by "git push" when it fails due to non-ff were not very helpful to new users; it has been broken into three cases, and each is given a separate advice message.
The insn sheet given by "rebase -i" did not make it clear that the insn lines can be re-ordered to affect the order of the commits in the resulting history.
"git repack" used to write out unreachable objects as loose objects when repacking, even if such loose objects will immediately pruned due to its age.
A contrib script "rerere-train" did not work out of the box unless user futzed with her $PATH.
"git rev-parse --show-prefix" used to emit nothing when run at the top-level of the working tree, but now it gives a blank line.
The i18n of error message "git stash save" was not properly done.
"git submodule" used a sed script that some platforms mishandled.
When using a Perl script on a system where "perl" found on user's $PATH could be ancient or otherwise broken, we allow builders to specify the path to a good copy of Perl with $PERL_PATH. The gitweb test forgot to use that Perl when running its test.
Also contains minor fixes and documentation updates.

New in Git 1.7.10.1 (May 2, 2012)

Additions since v1.7.10:
Localization message files for Danish and German have been added.
Fixes since v1.7.10:
"git add -p" is not designed to deal with unmerged paths but did not exclude them and tried to apply funny patches only to fail.
"git blame" started missing quite a few changes from the origin since we stopped using the diff minimalization by default in v1.7.2 era.
When PATH contains an unreadable directory, alias expansion code did not kick in, and failed with an error that said "git-subcmd" was not found.
"git clean -d -f" (not "-d -f -f") is supposed to protect nested working trees of independent git repositories that exist in the current project working tree from getting removed, but the protection applied only to such working trees that are at the top-level of the current project by mistake.
"git commit --author=$name" did not tell the name that was being recorded in the resulting commit to hooks, even though it does do so when the end user overrode the authorship via the "GIT_AUTHOR_NAME" environment variable.
When "git commit --template F" errors out because the user did not touch the message, it claimed that it aborts due to "empty message", which was utterly wrong.
The regexp configured with diff.wordregex was incorrectly reused across files.
An age-old corner case bug in combine diff (only triggered with -U0 and the hunk at the beginning of the file needs to be shown) has been fixed.
Rename detection logic used to match two empty files as renames during merge-recursive, leading to unnatural mismerges.
The parser in "fast-import" did not diagnose ":9" style references that is not followed by required SP/LF as an error.
When "git fetch" encounters repositories with too many references, the command line of "fetch-pack" that is run by a helper e.g. remote-curl, may fail to hold all of them. Now such an internal invocation can feed the references through the standard input of "fetch-pack".
"git fetch" that recurses into submodules on demand did not check if it needs to go into submodules when non branches (most notably, tags) are fetched.
"log -p --graph" used with "--stat" had a few formatting error.
Running "notes merge --commit" failed to perform correctly when run from any directory inside $GIT_DIR/. When "notes merge" stops with conflicts, $GIT_DIR/NOTES_MERGE_WORKTREE is the place a user edits to resolve it.
The 'push to upstream' implementation was broken in some corner cases. "git push $there" without refspec, when the current branch is set to push to a remote different from $there, used to push to $there using the upstream information to a remote unreleated to $there.
Giving "--continue" to a conflicted "rebase -i" session skipped a commit that only results in changes to submodules.
Also contains minor fixes and documentation updates.

New in Git 1.7.10 (Apr 7, 2012)

Compatibility Notes:
From this release on, the "git merge" command in an interactive session will start an editor when it automatically resolves the merge for the user to explain the resulting commit, just like the "git commit" command does when it wasn't given a commit message.
If you have a script that runs "git merge" and keeps its standard input and output attached to the user's terminal, and if you do not want the user to explain the resulting merge commits, you can export GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT environment variable set to "no".
To disable this behavior (if you want your users to explain their merge commits, you do not have to do anything). Alternatively, you can give the "--no-edit" option to individual invocations of the "git merge" command if you know everybody who uses your script has Git v1.7.8 or newer.
The "--binary/-b" options to "git am" have been a no-op for quite a while and were deprecated in mid 2008 (v1.6.0). When you give these options to "git am", it will now warn and ask you not to use them.
When you do not tell which branches and tags to push to the "git push" command in any way, the command used "matching refs" rule to update remote branches and tags with branches and tags with the same name you locally have. In future versions of Git, this will change to push out only your current branch according to either the "upstream" or the "current" rule. Although "upstream" may be more powerful once the user understands Git better, the semantics "current" gives is simpler and easier to understand for beginners and may be a safer and better default option. We haven't decided yet which one to switch to.
Updates since v1.7.9:
UI, Workflows & Features:
various "gitk" updates. - show the path to the top level directory in the window title - update preference edit dialog - display file list correctly when directories are given on command line - make "git-describe" output in the log message into a clickable link - avoid matching the UNIX timestamp part when searching all fields - give preference to symbolic font names like sans & monospace - allow comparing two commits using a mark - "gitk" honors log.showroot configuration.
Teams for localizing the messages from the Porcelain layer of commands are starting to form, thanks to Jiang Xin who volunteered to be the localization coordinator. Translated messages for simplified Chinese, Swedish and Portuguese are available.
The configuration mechanism learned an "include" facility; an assignment to the include.path pseudo-variable causes the named file to be included in-place when Git looks up configuration variables.
A content filter (clean/smudge) used to be just a way to make the recorded contents "more useful", and allowed to fail; a filter can now optionally be marked as "required".
Options whose names begin with "--no-" (e.g. the "--no-verify" option of the "git commit" command) can be negated by omitting "no-" from its name, e.g. "git commit --verify".
"git am" learned to pass "-b" option to underlying "git mailinfo", so that a bracketed string other than "PATCH" at the beginning can be kept.
"git clone" learned "--single-branch" option to limit cloning to a single branch (surprise!); tags that do not point into the history of the branch are not fetched.
"git clone" learned to detach the HEAD in the resulting repository when the user specifies a tag with "--branch" (e.g., "--branch=v1.0"). Clone also learned to print the usual "detached HEAD" advice in such a case, similar to "git checkout v1.0".
When showing a patch while ignoring whitespace changes, the context lines are taken from the postimage, in order to make it easier to view the output.
"git diff --stat" learned to adjust the width of the output on wider terminals, and give more columns to pathnames as needed.
"diff-highlight" filter (in contrib/) was updated to produce more aesthetically pleasing output.
"fsck" learned "--no-dangling" option to omit dangling object information.
"git log -G" and "git log -S" learned to pay attention to the "-i" option. With "-i", "log -G" ignores the case when finding patch hunks that introduce or remove a string that matches the given pattern. Similarly with "-i", "log -S" ignores the case when finding the commit the given block of text appears or disappears from the file.
"git merge" in an interactive session learned to spawn the editor by default to let the user edit the auto-generated merge message, to encourage people to explain their merges better. Legacy scripts can export GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT=no to retain the historical behavior. Both "git merge" and "git pull" can be given --no-edit from the command line to accept the auto-generated merge message.
The advice message given when the user didn't give enough clue on what to merge to "git pull" and "git merge" has been updated to be more concise and easier to understand.
"git push" learned the "--prune" option, similar to "git fetch".
The whole directory that houses a top-level superproject managed by "git submodule" can be moved to another place.
"git symbolic-ref" learned the "--short" option to abbreviate the refname it shows unambiguously.
"git tag --list" can be given "--points-at " to limit its output to those that point at the given object.
"gitweb" allows intermediate entries in the directory hierarchy that leads to a project to be clicked, which in turn shows the list of projects inside that directory.
"gitweb" learned to read various pieces of information for the repositories lazily, instead of reading everything that could be needed (including the ones that are not necessary for a specific task).
Project search in "gitweb" shows the substring that matched in the project name and description highlighted.
HTTP transport learned to authenticate with a proxy if needed.
A new script "diffall" is added to contrib/; it drives an external tool to perform a directory diff of two Git revisions in one go, unlike "difftool" that compares one file at a time.
Foreign Interface:
Improved handling of views, labels and branches in "git-p4" (in contrib).
"git-p4" (in contrib) suffered from unnecessary merge conflicts when p4 expanded the embedded $RCS$-like keywords; it can be now told to unexpand them.
Some "git-svn" updates.
"vcs-svn"/"svn-fe" learned to read dumps with svn-deltas and support incremental imports.
"git difftool/mergetool" learned to drive DeltaWalker.
Performance:
Unnecessary calls to parse_object() "git upload-pack" makes in response to "git fetch", have been eliminated, to help performance in repositories with excessive number of refs.
Internal Implementation (please report possible regressions):
Recursive call chains in "git index-pack" to deal with long delta chains have been flattened, to reduce the stack footprint.
Use of add_extra_ref() API is now gone, to make it possible to cleanly restructure the overall refs API.
The command line parser of "git pack-objects" now uses parse-options API.
The test suite supports the new "test_pause" helper function.
Parallel to the test suite, there is a beginning of performance benchmarking framework.
t/Makefile is adjusted to prevent newer versions of GNU make from running tests in seemingly random order.
The code to check if a path points at a file beyond a symbolic link has been restructured to be thread-safe.
When pruning directories that has become empty during "git prune" and "git prune-packed", call closedir() that iterates over a directory before rmdir() it.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes since v1.7.9:
Build with NO_PERL_MAKEMAKER was broken and Git::I18N did not work with versions of Perl older than 5.8.3. (merge 5eb660e ab/perl-i18n later to maint).
"git tag -s" honored "gpg.program" configuration variable since 1.7.9, but "git tag -v" and "git verify-tag" didn't. (merge a2c2506 az/verify-tag-use-gpg-config later to maint).
"configure" script learned to take "--with-sane-tool-path" from the command line to record SANE_TOOL_PATH (used to avoid broken platform tools in /usr/bin) in config.mak.autogen. This may be useful for people on Solaris who have saner tools outside /usr/xpg[46]/bin.
zsh port of bash completion script needed another workaround.

New in Git 1.7.10 RC 4 (Apr 4, 2012)

New in Git 1.7.9.6 (Apr 3, 2012)

New in Git 1.7.10 RC 3 (Mar 29, 2012)

New in Git 1.7.9.5 (Mar 27, 2012)

New in Git 1.7.10 RC 2 (Mar 24, 2012)

New in Git 1.7.9.4 (Mar 13, 2012)

New in Git 1.7.9.3 (Mar 6, 2012)

New in Git 1.7.9.2 (Feb 23, 2012)

Fixes:
Bash completion script (in contrib/) did not like a pattern that begins with a dash to be passed to __git_ps1 helper function.
Adaptation of the bash completion script (in contrib/) for zsh incorrectly listed all subcommands when "git " was given to ask for list of porcelain subcommands.
The build procedure for profile-directed optimized binary was not working very well.
Some systems need to explicitly link -lcharset to get locale_charset().
t5541 ignored user-supplied port number used for HTTP server testing.
The error message emitted when we see an empty loose object was not phrased correctly.
The code to ask for password did not fall back to the terminal input when GIT_ASKPASS is set but does not work (e.g. lack of X with GUI askpass helper).
We failed to give the true terminal width to any subcommand when they are invoked with the pager, i.e. "git -p cmd".
map_user() was not rewriting its output correctly, which resulted in the user visible symptom that "git blame -e" sometimes showed excess '>' at the end of email addresses.
"git checkout -b" did not allow switching out of an unborn branch.
When you have both .../foo and .../foo.git, "git clone .../foo" did not favor the former but the latter.
"git commit" refused to create a commit when entries added with "add -N" remained in the index, without telling Git what their content in the next commit should be. We should have created the commit without these paths.
"git diff --stat" said "files", "insertions", and "deletions" even when it is showing one "file", one "insertion" or one "deletion".
The output from "git diff --stat" for two paths that have the same amount of changes showed graph bars of different length due to the way we handled rounding errors.
"git grep" did not pay attention to -diff (hence -binary) attribute.
The transport programs (fetch, push, clone)ignored --no-progress and showed progress when sending their output to a terminal.
Sometimes error status detected by a check in an earlier phase of "git receive-pack" (the other end of "git push") was lost by later checks, resulting in false indication of success.
"git rev-list --verify" sometimes skipped verification depending on the phase of the moon, which dates back to 1.7.8.x series.
Search box in "gitweb" did not accept non-ASCII characters correctly.
Search interface of "gitweb" did not show multiple matches in the same file correctly.
Also contains minor fixes and documentation updates.

New in Git 1.7.9.1 (Feb 15, 2012)

Fixes since v1.7.9:
The makefile allowed environment variable X seep into it result in command names suffixed with unnecessary strings.
The set of included header files in compat/inet-{ntop,pton} wrappers was updated for Windows some time ago, but in a way that broke Solaris build.
rpmbuild noticed an unpackaged but installed *.mo file and failed.
Subprocesses spawned from various git programs were often left running to completion even when the top-level process was killed.
"git add -e" learned not to show a diff for an otherwise unmodified submodule that only has uncommitted local changes in the patch prepared by for the user to edit.
Typo in "git branch --edit-description my-tpoic" was not diagnosed.
Using "git grep -l/-L" together with options -W or --break may not make much sense as the output is to only count the number of hits and there is no place for file breaks, but the latter options made "-l/-L" to miscount the hits.
"git log --first-parent $pathspec" did not stay on the first parent chain and veered into side branch from which the whole change to the specified paths came.
"git merge --no-edit $tag" failed to honor the --no-edit option.
"git merge --ff-only $tag" failed because it cannot record the required mergetag without creating a merge, but this is so common operation for branch that is used _only_ to follow the upstream, so it was changed to allow fast-forwarding without recording the mergetag.
"git mergetool" now gives an empty file as the common base version to the backend when dealing with the "both sides added, differently" case.
"git push -q" was not sufficiently quiet.
When "git push" fails to update any refs, the client side did not report an error correctly to the end user.
"rebase" and "commit --amend" failed to work on commits with ancient timestamps near year 1970.
When asking for a tag to be pulled, "request-pull" did not show the name of the tag prefixed with "tags/", which would have helped older clients.
"git submodule add $path" forgot to recompute the name to be stored in .gitmodules when the submodule at $path was once added to the superproject and already initialized.
Many small corner case bugs on "git tag -n" was corrected.
Also contains minor fixes and documentation updates.

New in Git 1.7.9 (Feb 3, 2012)

Updates:
gitk updates accumulated since early 2011.
git-gui updated to 0.16.0.
git-p4 (in contrib/) updates.
Git uses gettext to translate its most common interface messages into the user's language if translations are available and the locale is appropriately set. Distributors can drop new PO files in po/ to add new translations.
The code to handle username/password for HTTP transactions used in "git push" & "git fetch" learned to talk "credential API" to external programs to cache or store them, to allow integration with platform native keychain mechanisms.
The input prompts in the terminal use our own getpass() replacement when possible. HTTP transactions used to ask for the username without echoing back what was typed, but with this change you will see it as you type.
The internals of "revert/cherry-pick" have been tweaked to prepare building more generic "sequencer" on top of the implementation that drives them.
"git rev-parse FETCH_HEAD" after "git fetch" without specifying what to fetch from the command line will now show the commit that would be merged if the command were "git pull".
"git add" learned to stream large files directly into a packfile instead of writing them into individual loose object files.
"git checkout -B " is a more intuitive way to spell "git reset --keep ".
"git checkout" and "git merge" learned "--no-overwrite-ignore" option to tell Git that untracked and ignored files are not expendable.
"git commit --amend" learned "--no-edit" option to say that the user is amending the tree being recorded, without updating the commit log message.
"git commit" and "git reset" re-learned the optimization to prime the cache-tree information in the index, which makes it faster to write a tree object out after the index entries are updated.
"git commit" detects and rejects an attempt to stuff NUL byte in the commit log message.
"git commit" learned "-S" to GPG-sign the commit; this can be shown with the "--show-signature" option to "git log".
fsck and prune are relatively lengthy operations that still go silent while making the end-user wait. They learned to give progress output like other slow operations.
The set of built-in function-header patterns for various languages knows MATLAB.
"git log --format=''" learned new %g[nNeE] specifiers to show information from the reflog entries when walking the reflog (i.e. with "-g").
"git pull" can be used to fetch and merge an annotated/signed tag, instead of the tip of a topic branch. The GPG signature from the signed tag is recorded in the resulting merge commit for later auditing.
"git log" learned "--show-signature" option to show the signed tag that was merged that is embedded in the merge commit. It also can show the signature made on the commit with "git commit -S".
"git branch --edit-description" can be used to add descriptive text to explain what a topic branch is about.
"git fmt-merge-msg" learned to take the branch description into account when preparing a merge summary that "git merge" records when merging a local branch.
"git request-pull" has been updated to convey more information useful for integrators to decide if a topic is worth merging and what is pulled is indeed what the requestor asked to pull, including:
- the tip of the branch being requested to be merged; - the branch description describing what the topic is about; - the contents of the annotated tag, when requesting to pull a tag.
"git pull" learned to notice 'pull.rebase' configuration variable, which serves as a global fallback for setting 'branch..rebase' configuration variable per branch.
"git tag" learned "--cleanup" option to control how the whitespaces and empty lines in tag message are cleaned up.
"gitweb" learned to show side-by-side diff.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git 1.7.9 RC 2 (Jan 19, 2012)

Updates since v1.7.8:
gitk updates accumulated since early 2011.
git-gui updated to 0.16.0.
git-p4 (in contrib/) updates.
Git uses gettext to translate its most common interface messages into the user's language if translations are available and the locale is appropriately set. Distributors can drop in new PO files in po/ to add new translations.
The code to handle username/password for HTTP transaction used in "git push" & "git fetch" learned to talk "credential API" to external programs to cache or store them, to allow integration with platform native keychain mechanisms.
The prompted input in the terminal use our own getpass() replacement when possible. HTTP transactions used to ask username without echoing back what was typed, but with this change you will see it as you type.
The internal of "revert/cherry-pick" has been tweaked to prepare building more generic "sequencer" on top of the implementation that drives them.
"git add" learned to stream large files directly into a packfile instead of writing them into individual loose object files.
"git checkout -B " is a more intuitive way to spell "git reset --keep ".
"git checkout" and "git merge" learned "--no-overwrite-ignore" option to tell Git that untracked and ignored files are not expendable.
"git commit --amend" learned "--no-edit" option to say that the user is amending the tree being recorded, without updating the commit log message.
"git commit" and "git reset" re-learned the optimization to prime the cache-tree information in the index, which makes it faster to write a tree object out after the index entries are updated.
"git commit" detects and rejects an attempt to stuff NUL byte in the commit log message.
"git commit" learned "-S" to GPG-sign the commit; this can be shown with the "--show-signature" option to "git log".
fsck and prune are relatively lengthy operations that still go silent while making the end-user wait. They learned to give progress output like other slow operations.
The set of built-in function-header patterns for various languages knows MATLAB.
"git log --format=''" learned new %g[nNeE] specifiers to show information from the reflog entries when warlking the reflog (i.e. with "-g").
"git pull" can be used to fetch and merge an annotated/signed tag, instead of the tip of a topic branch. The GPG signature from the signed tag is recorded in the resulting merge commit for later auditing.
"git log" learned "--show-signature" option to show the signed tag that was merged that is embedded in the merge commit. It also can show the signature made on the commit with "git commit -S".
"git branch --edit-description" can be used to add descriptive text to explain what a topic branch is about.
"git fmt-merge-msg" learned to take the branch description into account when preparing a merge summary that "git merge" records when merging a local branch.
"git request-pull" has been updated to convey more information useful for integrators to decide if a topic is worth merging and what is pulled is indeed what the requestor asked to pull.
"git pull" learned to notice 'pull.rebase' configuration variable, which serves as a global fallback for setting 'branch..rebase' configuration variable per branch.
"git tag" learned "--cleanup" option to control how the whitespaces and empty lines in tag message are cleaned up.
"gitweb" learned to show side-by-side diff.
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.

New in Git 1.7.8.3 (Jan 7, 2012)

New in Git 1.7.8.2 (Dec 29, 2011)

Fixes since 1.7.8.1:
Porcelain commands like "git reset" did not distinguish deletions and type-changes from ordinary modification, and reported them with the same 'M' moniker. They now use 'D' (for deletion) and 'T' (for type-change) to match "git status -s" and "git diff --name-status".
The configuration file parser used for sizes (e.g. bigFileThreshold) did not correctly interpret 'g' suffix.
The replacement implemention for snprintf used on platforms with native snprintf that is broken did not use va_copy correctly.
LF-to-CRLF streaming filter replaced all LF with CRLF, which might be techinically correct but not friendly to people who are trying to recover from earlier mistakes of using CRLF in the repository data in the first place. It now refrains from doing so for LF that follows a CR.
git native connection going over TCP (not over SSH) did not set SO_KEEPALIVE option which failed to receive link layer errors.
"git branch -m HEAD" is an obvious no-op but was not allowed.
"git checkout -m" did not recreate the conflicted state in a "both sides added, without any common ancestor version" conflict situation.
"git cherry-pick $commit" (not a range) created an unnecessary sequencer state and interfered with valid workflow to use the command during a session to cherry-pick multiple commits.
You could make "git commit" segfault by giving the "--no-message" option.
"fast-import" did not correctly update an existing notes tree, possibly corrupting the fan-out.
"git fetch-pack" accepted unqualified refs that do not begin with refs/ by mistake and compensated it by matching the refspec with tail-match, which was doubly wrong. This broke fetching from a repository with a funny named ref "refs/foo/refs/heads/master" and a 'master' branch with "git fetch-pack refs/heads/master", as the command incorrectly considered the former a "match".
"git log --follow" did not honor the rename threshold score given with the -M option (e.g. "-M50%").
"git mv" gave suboptimal error/warning messages when it overwrites target files. It also did not pay attention to "-v" option.
Authenticated "git push" over dumb HTTP were broken with a recent change and failed without asking for password when username is given.
"git push" to an empty repository over HTTP were broken with a recent change to the ref handling.
"git push -v" forgot how to be verbose by mistake. It now properly becomes verbose when asked to.
When a "reword" action in "git rebase -i" failed to run "commit --amend", we did not give the control back to the user to resolve the situation, and instead kept the original commit log message.
Also contains minor fixes and documentation updates.

New in Git 1.7.8.1 (Dec 22, 2011)

New in Git 1.7.8 (Dec 5, 2011)

Some git-svn, git-gui, git-p4 (in contrib) and msysgit updates.
Updates to bash completion scripts.
The build procedure has been taught to take advantage of computed dependency automatically when the complier supports it.
The date parser now accepts timezone designators that lack minutes part and also has a colon between "hh:mm".
The contents of the /etc/mailname file, if exists, is used as the default value of the hostname part of the committer/author e-mail.
"git am" learned how to read from patches generated by Hg.
"git archive" talking with a remote repository can report errors from the remote side in a more informative way.
"git branch" learned an explicit --list option to ask for branches listed, optionally with a glob matching pattern to limit its output.
"git check-attr" learned "--cached" option to look at .gitattributes files from the index, not from the working tree.
Variants of "git cherry-pick" and "git revert" that take multiple commits learned to "--continue" and "--abort".
"git daemon" gives more human readble error messages to clients using ERR packets when appropriate.
Errors at the network layer is logged by "git daemon".
"git diff" learned "--minimal" option to spend extra cycles to come up with a minimal patch output.
"git diff" learned "--function-context" option to show the whole function as context that was affected by a change.
"git difftool" can be told to skip launching the tool for a path by answering 'n' to its prompt.
"git fetch" learned to honor transfer.fsckobjects configuration to validate the objects that were received from the other end, just like "git receive-pack" (the receiving end of "git push") does.
"git fetch" makes sure that the set of objects it received from the other end actually completes the history before updating the refs. "git receive-pack" (the receiving end of "git push") learned to do the same.
"git fetch" learned that fetching/cloning from a regular file on the filesystem is not necessarily a request to unpack a bundle file; the file could be ".git" with "gitdir: " in it.
"git for-each-ref" learned "%(contents:subject)", "%(contents:body)" and "%(contents:signature)". The last one is useful for signed tags.
"git grep" used to incorrectly pay attention to .gitignore files scattered in the directory it was working in even when "--no-index" option was used. It no longer does this. The "--exclude-standard" option needs to be given to explicitly activate the ignore mechanism.
"git grep" learned "--untracked" option, where given patterns are searched in untracked (but not ignored) files as well as tracked files in the working tree, so that matches in new but not yet added files do not get missed.
The recursive merge backend no longer looks for meaningless existing merges in submodules unless in the outermost merge.
"git log" and friends learned "--children" option.
"git ls-remote" learned to respond to "-h"(elp) requests.
"mediawiki" remote helper can interact with (surprise!) MediaWiki with "git fetch" & "git push".
"git merge" learned the "--edit" option to allow users to edit the merge commit log message.
"git rebase -i" can be told to use special purpose editor suitable only for its insn sheet via sequence.editor configuration variable.
"git send-email" learned to respond to "-h"(elp) requests.
"git send-email" allows the value given to sendemail.aliasfile to begin with "~/" to refer to the $HOME directory.
"git send-email" forces use of Authen::SASL::Perl to work around issues between Authen::SASL::Cyrus and AUTH PLAIN/LOGIN.
"git stash" learned "--include-untracked" option to stash away untracked/ignored cruft from the working tree.
"git submodule clone" does not leak an error message to the UI level unnecessarily anymore.
"git submodule update" learned to honor "none" as the value for submodule..update to specify that the named submodule should not be checked out by default.
When populating a new submodule directory with "git submodule init", the $GIT_DIR metainformation directory for submodules is created inside $GIT_DIR/modules// directory of the superproject and referenced via the gitfile mechanism. This is to make it possible to switch between commits in the superproject that has and does not have the submodule in the tree without re-cloning.
"gitweb" leaked unescaped control characters from syntax hiliter outputs.
"gitweb" can be told to give custom string at the end of the HTML HEAD element.
"gitweb" now has its own manual pages.

New in Git 1.7.6 (Jul 21, 2011)

Various git-svn updates.
Updates the way content tags are handled in gitweb. Also adds
a UI to choose common timezone for displaying the dates.
Similar to branch names, tagnames that begin with "-" are now
disallowed.
Clean-up of the C part of i18n (but not l10n---please wait)
continues.
The scripting part of the codebase is getting prepared for i18n/l10n.
Pushing and pulling from a repository with large number of refs that
point to identical commits are optimized by not listing the same commit
during the common ancestor negotiation exchange with the other side.
Adding a file larger than core.bigfilethreshold (defaults to 1/2 Gig)
using "git add" will send the contents straight to a packfile without
having to hold it and its compressed representation both at the same
time in memory.
Processes spawned by "[alias] = !process" in the configuration
can inspect GIT_PREFIX environment variable to learn where in the
working tree the original command was invoked.
A magic pathspec ":/" tells a command that limits its operation to
the current directory when ran from a subdirectory to work on the
entire working tree. In general, ":/path/to/file" would be relative
to the root of the working tree hierarchy.
After "git reset --hard; edit Makefile; cd t/", "git add -u" would
be a no-op, but "git add -u :/" would add the updated contents of
the Makefile at the top level. If you want to name a path in the
current subdirectory whose unusual name begins with ":/", you can
name it by "./:/that/path" or by "\:/that/path".
"git blame" learned "--abbrev[=]" option to control the minimum
number of hexdigits shown for commit object names.
"git blame" learned "--line-porcelain" that is less efficient but is
easier to parse.
Aborting "git commit --interactive" discards updates to the index
made during the interactive session.
"git commit" learned a "--patch" option to directly jump to the
per-hunk selection UI of the interactive mode.
"git diff" and its family of commands learned --dirstat=0 to show
directories that contribute less than 0.1% of changes.
"git diff" and its family of commands learned --dirstat=lines mode to
assess damage to the directory based on number of lines in the patch
output, not based on the similarity numbers.
"git format-patch" learned "--quiet" option to suppress the output of
the names of generated files.
"git format-patch" quotes people's names when it has RFC822 special
characters in it, e.g. "Junio C. Hamano" . Earlier
it was up to the user to do this when using its output.
"git format-patch" can take an empty --subject-prefix now.
"git grep" learned the "-P" option to take pcre regular expressions.
"git log" and friends learned a new "--notes" option to replace the
"--show-notes" option. Unlike "--show-notes", "--notes=" does
not imply showing the default notes.
They also learned a log.abbrevCommit configuration variable to augment
the --abbrev-commit command line option.
"git ls-remote" learned "--exit-code" option to consider it a
different kind of error when no remote ref to be shown.
"git merge" learned "-" as a short-hand for "the previous branch", just
like the way "git checkout -" works.
"git merge" uses "merge.ff" configuration variable to decide to always
create a merge commit (i.e. --no-ff, aka merge.ff=no), refuse to create
a merge commit (i.e. --ff-only, aka merge.ff=only). Setting merge.ff=yes
(or not setting it at all) restores the default behaviour of allowing
fast-forward to happen when possible.
p4-import (from contrib) learned a new option --preserve-user.
"git read-tree -m" learned "--dry-run" option that reports if a merge
would fail without touching the index nor the working tree.
"git rebase" that does not specify on top of which branch to rebase
the current branch now uses @{upstream} of the current branch.
"git rebase" finished either normally or with --abort did not
update the reflog for HEAD to record the event to come back to
where it started from.
"git remote add -t only-this-branch --mirror=fetch" is now allowed. Earlier
a fetch-mode mirror meant mirror everything, but now it only means refs are
not renamed.
"git rev-list --count" used with "--cherry-mark" counts the cherry-picked
commits separately, producing more a useful output.
"git submodule update" learned "--force" option to get rid of local
changes in submodules and replace them with the up-to-date version.
"git status" and friends ignore .gitmodules file while the file is
still in a conflicted state during a merge, to avoid using information
that is not final and possibly corrupt with conflict markers.

New in Git 1.7.4.1 (Feb 26, 2011)

New in Git 1.7.4 (Feb 7, 2011)

The documentation Makefile now assumes by default asciidoc 8 and docbook-xsl >= 1.73. If you have older versions, you can set ASCIIDOC7 and ASCIIDOC_ROFF, respectively.
The option parsers of various commands that create new branches (or rename existing ones to a new name) were too loose and users were allowed to give a branch a name that begins with a dash by creative abuse of their command line options, which only led to burning themselves. The name of a branch cannot begin with a dash now.
System-wide fallback default attributes can be stored in /etc/gitattributes; the core.attributesfile configuration variable can be used to customize the path to this file.
The thread structure generated by "git send-email" has changed slightly. Setting the cover letter of the latest series as a reply to the cover letter of the previous series with --in-reply-to used to make the new cover letter and all the patches replies to the cover letter of the previous series; this has been changed to make the patches in the new series replies to the new cover letter.
The Bash completion script in contrib/ has been adjusted to be usable with Bash 4 (options with '=value' didn't complete). It has been also made usable with zsh.
Different pagers can be chosen depending on which subcommand is being run under the pager, using the "pager." variable.
The hardcoded tab-width of 8 that is used in whitespace breakage checks is now configurable via the attributes mechanism.
Support of case insensitive filesystems (i.e. "core.ignorecase") has been improved. For example, the gitignore mechanism didn't pay attention to case insensitivity.
The : syntax for naming a blob in a tree, and the : syntax for naming a blob in the index (e.g. "master:Makefile", ":hello.c") have been extended. You can start with "./" to implicitly have the (sub)directory you are in prefixed to the lookup. Similarly, ":../Makefile" from a subdirectory would mean "the Makefile of the parent directory in the index".
"git blame" learned the --show-email option to display the e-mail addresses instead of the names of authors.
"git commit" learned the --fixup and --squash options to help later invocation of interactive rebase.
Command line options to "git cvsimport" whose names are in capital letters (-A, -M, -R and -S) can now be specified as the default in the .git/config file by their longer names (cvsimport.authorsFile, cvsimport.mergeRegex, cvsimport.trackRevisions, cvsimport.ignorePaths).
"git daemon" can be built in the MinGW environment.
"git daemon" can take more than one --listen option to listen to multiple addresses.
"git describe --exact-match" was optimized not to read commit objects unnecessarily.
"git diff" and "git grep" learned what functions and subroutines in Fortran, Pascal and Perl look like.
"git fetch" learned the "--recurse-submodules" option.
"git mergetool" tells vim/gvim to show a three-way diff by default (use vimdiff2/gvimdiff2 as the tool name for old behavior).
"git log -G" limits the output to commits whose change has added or deleted lines that match the given pattern.
"git read-tree" with no argument as a way to empty the index is deprecated; we might want to remove it in the future. Users can use the new --empty option to be more explicit instead.
"git repack -f" does not spend cycles to recompress objects in the non-delta representation anymore (use -F if you really mean it e.g. after you changed the core.compression variable setting).
"git merge --log" used to limit the resulting merge log to 20 entries; this is now customizable by giving e.g. "--log=47".
"git merge" may work better when all files were moved out of a directory in one branch while a new file is created in place of that directory in the other branch.
"git merge" learned the "--abort" option, synonymous to "git reset --merge" when a merge is in progress.
"git notes" learned the "merge" subcommand to merge notes refs. In addition to the default manual conflict resolution, there are also several notes merge strategies for automatically resolving notes merge conflicts.
"git rebase --autosquash" can use SHA-1 object names to name the commit which is to be fixed up (e.g. "fixup! e83c5163").
The default "recursive" merge strategy learned the --rename-threshold option to influence the rename detection, similar to the -M option of "git diff". From the "git merge" frontend, the "-X" interface, e.g. "git merge -Xrename-threshold=50% ...", can be used to trigger this.
The "recursive" strategy also learned to ignore various whitespace changes; the most notable is -Xignore-space-at-eol.
"git send-email" learned "--to-cmd", similar to "--cc-cmd", to read the recipient list from a command output.
"git send-email" learned to read and use "To:" from its input files.
you can extend "git shell", which is often used on boxes that allow git-only login over ssh as login shell, with a custom set of commands.
The current branch name in "git status" output can be colored differently from the generic header color by setting the "color.status.branch" variable.
"git submodule sync" updates metainformation for all submodules, not just the ones that have been checked out.
gitweb can use a custom 'highlight' command with its configuration file.
other gitweb updates.

New in Git 1.7.3.4 (Jan 6, 2011)

New in Git 1.7.3.3 (Dec 11, 2010)

New in Git 1.7.2.1 (Jul 29, 2010)

New in Git 1.7.1 (Jun 11, 2010)

Eric Raymond is the maintainer of updated CIAbot scripts, in contrib/.
gitk updates.
Some commands (e.g. svn and http interfaces) that interactively ask for a password can be told to use an external program given via GIT_ASKPASS.
Conflict markers that lead the common ancestor in diff3-style output now have a label, which hopefully would help third-party tools that expect one.
Comes with an updated bash-completion script.
"git am" learned "--keep-cr" option to handle inputs that are a mixture of changes to files with and without CRLF line endings.
"git cvsimport" learned -R option to leave revision mapping between CVS revisions and resulting git commits.
"git diff --submodule" notices and describes dirty submodules.
"git for-each-ref" learned %(symref), %(symref:short) and %(flag) tokens.
"git hash-object --stdin-paths" can take "--no-filters" option now.
"git init" can be told to look at init.templatedir configuration variable (obviously that has to come from either /etc/gitconfig or $HOME/.gitconfig).
"git grep" learned "--no-index" option, to search inside contents that are not managed by git.
"git grep" learned --color=auto/always/never.
"git grep" learned to paint filename and line-number in colors.
"git log -p --first-parent -m" shows one-parent diff for merge commits, instead of showing combined diff.
"git merge-file" learned to use custom conflict marker size and also to use the "union merge" behaviour.
"git notes" command has been rewritten in C and learned many commands and features to help you carry notes forward across rebases and amends.
"git request-pull" identifies the commit the request is relative to in a more readable way.
"git reset" learned "--keep" option that lets you discard commits near the tip while preserving your local changes in a way similar to how "git checkout branch" does.
"git status" notices and describes dirty submodules.
"git svn" should work better when interacting with repositories with CRLF line endings.
"git imap-send" learned to support CRAM-MD5 authentication.
"gitweb" installation procedure can use "minified" js/css files better.
Various documentation updates.

New in Git 1.7.0.6 (Apr 30, 2010)

New in Git 1.6.6.1 (Feb 10, 2010)

New in Git 1.6.6 (Jan 5, 2010)

* various gitk updates including use of themed widgets under Tk 8.5,
Japanese translation, a fix to a bug when running "gui blame" from
a subdirectory, etc.
* various git-gui updates including new translations, wm states fixes,
Tk bug workaround after quitting, improved heuristics to trigger gc,
etc.
* various git-svn updates.
* "git fetch" over http learned a new mode that is different from the
traditional "dumb commit walker".
(portability)
* imap-send can be built on mingw port.
(performance)
* "git diff -B" has smaller memory footprint.
(usability, bells and whistles)
* The object replace mechanism can be bypassed with --no-replace-objects
global option given to the "git" program.
* In configuration files, a few variables that name paths can begin with ~/
and ~username/ and they are expanded as expected.
"git subcmd -h" now shows short usage help for many more subcommands.
"git bisect reset" can reset to an arbitrary commit.
"git checkout frotz" when there is no local branch "frotz" but there
is only one remote tracking branch "frotz" is taken as a request to
start the named branch at the corresponding remote tracking branch.
"git commit -c/-C/--amend" can be told with a new "--reset-author" option
to ignore authorship information in the commit it is taking the message
from.
"git describe" can be told to add "-dirty" suffix with "--dirty" option.
"git diff" learned --submodule option to show a list of one-line logs
instead of differences between the commit object names.
"git diff" learned to honor diff.color.func configuration to paint
function name hint printed on the hunk header "@@ -j,k +l,m @@" line
in the specified color.
"git fetch" learned --all and --multiple options, to run fetch from
many repositories, and --prune option to remove remote tracking
branches that went stale. These make "git remote update" and "git
remote prune" less necessary (there is no plan to remove "remote
update" nor "remote prune", though).
"git fsck" by default checks the packfiles (i.e. "--full" is the
default); you can turn it off with "git fsck --no-full".
"git grep" can use -F (fixed strings) and -i (ignore case) together.
import-tars contributed fast-import frontend learned more types of
compressed tarballs.
"git instaweb" knows how to talk with mod_cgid to apache2.