Git v2.9.4 Release Notes
========================
Fixes since v2.9.3
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* There are certain house-keeping tasks that need to be performed at
the very beginning of any Git program, and programs that are not
built-in commands had to do them exactly the same way as "git"
potty does. It was easy to make mistakes in one-off standalone
programs (like test helpers). A common "main()" function that
calls cmd_main() of individual program has been introduced to
make it harder to make mistakes.
* "git merge" with renormalization did not work well with
merge-recursive, due to "safer crlf" conversion kicking in when it
shouldn't.
* The reflog output format is documented better, and a new format
--date=unix to report the seconds-since-epoch (without timezone)
has been added.
* "git push --force-with-lease" already had enough logic to allow
ensuring that such a push results in creation of a ref (i.e. the
receiving end did not have another push from sideways that would be
discarded by our force-pushing), but didn't expose this possibility
to the users. It does so now.
* "import-tars" fast-import script (in contrib/) used to ignore a
hardlink target and replaced it with an empty file, which has been
corrected to record the same blob as the other file the hardlink is
shared with.
* "git mv dir non-existing-dir/" did not work in some environments
the same way as existing mainstream platforms. The code now moves
"dir" to "non-existing-dir", without relying on rename("A", "B/")
that strips the trailing slash of '/'.
* The "t/" hierarchy is prone to get an unusual pathname; "make test"
has been taught to make sure they do not contain paths that cannot
be checked out on Windows (and the mechanism can be reusable to
catch pathnames that are not portable to other platforms as need
arises).
* When "git merge-recursive" works on history with many criss-cross
merges in "verbose" mode, the names the command assigns to the
virtual merge bases could have overwritten each other by unintended
reuse of the same piece of memory.
* "git checkout --detach <branch>" used to give the same advice
message as that is issued when "git checkout <tag>" (or anything
that is not a branch name) is given, but asking with "--detach" is
an explicit enough sign that the user knows what is going on. The
advice message has been squelched in this case.
* "git difftool" by default ignores the error exit from the backend
commands it spawns, because often they signal that they found
differences by exiting with a non-zero status code just like "diff"
does; the exit status codes 126 and above however are special in
that they are used to signal that the command is not executable,
does not exist, or killed by a signal. "git difftool" has been
taught to notice these exit status codes.
* On Windows, help.browser configuration variable used to be ignored,
which has been corrected.
* The "git -c var[=val] cmd" facility to append a configuration
variable definition at the end of the search order was described in
git(1) manual page, but not in git-config(1), which was more likely
place for people to look for when they ask "can I make a one-shot
override, and if so how?"
* The tempfile (hence its user lockfile) API lets the caller to open
a file descriptor to a temporary file, write into it and then
finalize it by first closing the filehandle and then either
removing or renaming the temporary file. When the process spawns a
subprocess after obtaining the file descriptor, and if the
subprocess has not exited when the attempt to remove or rename is
made, the last step fails on Windows, because the subprocess has
the file descriptor still open. Open tempfile with O_CLOEXEC flag
to avoid this (on Windows, this is mapped to O_NOINHERIT).
* "git-shell" rejects a request to serve a repository whose name
begins with a dash, which makes it no longer possible to get it
confused into spawning service programs like "git-upload-pack" with
an option like "--help", which in turn would spawn an interactive
pager, instead of working with the repository user asked to access
(i.e. the one whose name is "--help").
Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
