Git 2.9 Release Notes

=====================

Backward compatibility note

---------------------------

The end-user facing Porcelain level commands in the "git diff" and

"git log" by default enables the rename detection; you can still use

"diff.renames" configuration variable to disable this.

Updates since v2.8

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UI, Workflows & Features

* The end-user facing Porcelain level commands like "diff" and "log"

now enables 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" session.

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.

(merge 65a3629 mp/upload-pack-use-embedded-args later to maint).

* A test for tags has been restructured so that more parts of it can

easily be run on a platform without a working GnuPG.

(merge 618310a es/test-gpg-tags later to maint).

* 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.

(merge 11e6b3f jk/startup-info 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.

(merge 24990b2 jk/config-get-urlmatch later to maint).

* 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.

(merge fc7d47f jk/rev-parse-local-env-vars later to maint).

* "git index-pack --keep[=<msg>] pack-$name.pack" simply did not work.

(merge 0e94242 jc/maint-index-pack-keep later to maint).

* Fetching of history by naming a commit object name directly didn't

work across remote-curl transport.

(merge 754ecb1 gf/fetch-pack-direct-object-fetch later to maint).

* A small memory leak in an error codepath has been plugged in xdiff

code.

(merge 87f1625 rj/xdiff-prepare-plug-leak-on-error-codepath later to maint).

* strbuf_getwholeline() did not NUL-terminate the buffer on certain

corner cases in its error codepath.

(merge b709043 jk/getwholeline-getdelim-empty later to maint).

* Other minor clean-ups and documentation updates

(merge aed7480 mm/lockfile-error-message later to maint).

(merge bfee614 jc/index-pack later to maint).