Git 1.8.3.1

The first maintenance release 1.8.3.1 is out.

This is primarily to push out fixes to two regressions that seems to have affected many people recently.  Sorry about that.

• With Git 1.8.3, an entry "!dir" in .gitignore to say "This directory's contents is not ignored, unless other more specific entries tells us otherwise" did not work correctly. This regression has been fixed.
• With recent Git since 1.7.12.1 or so, "git daemon", when started by the root user and then switched to an unprivileged user, refused to run when ~root/.gitconfig (and XDG equivalent configuration files under ~root/.config/) cannot be read by the unprivileged user. The right way to start the daemon might be to reset its $HOME (where these configuration files are read from) to somewhere the user the daemon runs as, but it is cumbersome to set up. With 1.8.3.1, failure to access these files with EPERM is treated as if these files do not exist, which is not an error.

The release tarballs are available at the usual places:

        https://code.google.com/p/git-core/downloads/list
        https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/