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

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).