Git 2.5 Release Notes
=====================

Updates since v2.4
------------------

Ports


UI, Workflows & Features

 * "git p4" now detects the filetype (e.g. binary) correctly even when
   the files are opened exclusively.

 * "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.


Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.

 * "unsigned char [20]" used thoughout 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.


Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.


Fixes since v2.4
----------------

Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.4 in the maintenance
track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
notes for details).

 * 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
   correcty.
   (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).

 * Code cleanups and documentation updates.
   (merge 0269f96 mm/usage-log-l-can-take-regex later to maint).
   (merge 64f2589 nd/t1509-chroot-test later to maint).
   (merge f86a374 sb/test-bitmap-free-at-end later to maint).
   (merge 05bfc7d sb/line-log-plug-pairdiff-leak later to maint).