Here are the highlights, relative to the previous maintenance release v1.8.4.2:
- The interaction between use of Perl in our test suite and NO_PERL has been clarified a bit.
- A fast-import stream expresses a pathname with funny characters by quoting them in C style; remote-hg remote helper (in contrib/) forgot to unquote such a path.
- One long-standing flaw in the pack transfer protocol used by "git clone" was that there was no way to tell the other end which branch "HEAD" points at, and the receiving end needed to guess. A new capability has been defined in the pack protocol to convey this information so that cloning from a repository with more than one branches pointing at the same commit where the HEAD is at now reliably sets the initial branch in the resulting repository.
- We did not handle cases where http transport gets redirected during the authorization request (e.g. from http:// to https://).
- "git rev-list --objects ^v1.0^ v1.0" gave v1.0 tag itself in the output, but "git rev-list --objects v1.0^..v1.0" did not.
- The fall-back parsing of commit objects with broken author or committer lines were less robust than ideal in picking up the timestamps.
- Bash prompting code to deal with an SVN remote as an upstream were coded in a way not supported by older Bash versions (3.x).
- "git checkout topic", when there is not yet a local "topic" branch but there is a unique remote-tracking branch for a remote "topic" branch, pretended as if "git checkout -t -b topic remote/$r/topic" (for that unique remote $r) was run. This hack however was not implemented for "git checkout topic --".
- Coloring around octopus merges in "log --graph" output was screwy.
- We did not generate HTML version of documentation to "git subtree" in contrib/.
- The synopsis section of "git unpack-objects" documentation has been clarified a bit.
- An ancient How-To on serving Git repositories on an HTTP server lacked a warning that it has been mostly superseded with a more modern way.