Git 2.11 Release Notes
======================

Updates since v2.10
-------------------

UI, Workflows & Features

 * "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.


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.


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.
   (merge a117be4 po/range-doc later to maint).

 * "diff-highlight" script (in contrib/) learned to work better with
   "git log -p --graph" output.
   (merge 3dbfe2b bh/diff-highlight-graph later to maint).

 * 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.
   (merge 5c885c1 jk/test-lib-drop-pid-from-results later to maint).

 * Having a submodule whose ".git" repository is somehow corrupt
   caused a few commands that recurse into submodules loop forever.
   (merge 10f5c52 jc/submodule-anchor-git-dir later to maint).

 * "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.
   (merge 12cfa79 jc/forbid-symbolic-ref-d-HEAD later to maint).

 * 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.
   (merge 5babb5b js/t6026-clean-up later to maint).

 * Update a few tests that used to use GIT_CURL_VERBOSE to use the
   newer GIT_TRACE_CURL.
   (merge 14e2411 ep/use-git-trace-curl-in-tests later to maint).

 * "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.
   (merge b773dde jk/pack-tag-of-tag later to maint).

 * Update Japanese translation for "git-gui".
   (merge 02748bc sy/git-gui-i18n-ja later to maint).

 * "git fetch http::/site/path" did not die correctly and segfaulted
   instead.
   (merge d63ed6e jk/fix-remote-curl-url-wo-proto later to maint).

 * "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.
   (merge f14a310 js/git-gui-commit-gpgsign later to maint).

 * Other minor doc, test and build updates and code cleanups.
   (merge 3e1952e jk/squelch-false-warning-from-gcc-o3 later to maint).
   (merge ca2baa3 rs/compat-strdup later to maint).
   (merge d233097 rs/hex2chr later to maint).
   (merge c00bfc9 js/t9903-chaining later to maint).
   (merge 5e4e5bb sb/xdiff-remove-unused-static-decl later to maint).
   (merge 5cb5fe4 sb/transport-report-missing-submodule-on-stderr later to maint).
   (merge a1c8044 ah/misc-message-fixes later to maint).
   (merge ca9b37e sb/diff-cleanup later to maint).