4 files changed, 207 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/2.8.1.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.8.1.txt
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+Git v2.8.1 Release Notes
+========================
+
+Fixes since v2.8
+----------------
+
+ * "make rpmbuild" target was broken as its input, git.spec.in, was
+   not updated to match a file it describes that has been renamed
+   recently.  This has been fixed.
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/2.8.2.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.8.2.txt
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+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.8.2.txt
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+Git v2.8.2 Release Notes
+========================
+
+Fixes since v2.8.1
+------------------
+
+ * The embedded args argv-array in the child process is used to build
+   the command line to run pack-objects instead of using a separate
+   array of strings.
+
+ * Bunch of tests on "git clone" has been renumbered for better
+   organization.
+
+ * The tests that involve running httpd leaked the system-wide
+   configuration in /etc/gitconfig to the tested environment.
+
+ * "index-pack --keep=<msg>" was broken since v2.1.0 timeframe.
+
+ * "git config --get-urlmatch", unlike other variants of the "git
+   config --get" family, did not signal error with its exit status
+   when there was no matching configuration.
+
+ * The "--local-env-vars" and "--resolve-git-dir" options of "git
+   rev-parse" failed to work outside a repository when the command's
+   option parsing was rewritten in 1.8.5 era.
+
+ * Fetching of history by naming a commit object name directly didn't
+   work across remote-curl transport.
+
+ * A small memory leak in an error codepath has been plugged in xdiff
+   code.
+
+ * strbuf_getwholeline() did not NUL-terminate the buffer on certain
+   corner cases in its error codepath.
+
+ * The startup_info data, which records if we are working inside a
+   repository (among other things), are now uniformly available to Git
+   subcommand implementations, and Git avoids attempting to touch
+   references when we are not in a repository.
+
+ * "git mergetool" did not work well with conflicts that both sides
+   deleted.
+
+ * "git send-email" had trouble parsing alias file in mailrc format
+   when lines in it had trailing whitespaces on them.
+
+ * When "git merge --squash" stopped due to conflict, the concluding
+   "git commit" failed to read in the SQUASH_MSG that shows the log
+   messages from all the squashed commits.
+
+ * "git merge FETCH_HEAD" dereferenced NULL pointer when merging
+   nothing into an unborn history (which is arguably unusual usage,
+   which perhaps was the reason why nobody noticed it).
+
+ * Build updates for MSVC.
+
+ * "git diff -M" used to work better when two originally identical
+   files A and B got renamed to X/A and X/B by pairing A to X/A and B
+   to X/B, but this was broken in the 2.0 timeframe.
+
+ * "git send-pack --all <there>" was broken when its command line
+   option parsing was written in the 2.6 timeframe.
+
+ * When running "git blame $path" with unnormalized data in the index
+   for the path, the data in the working tree was blamed, even though
+   "git add" would not have changed what is already in the index, due
+   to "safe crlf" that disables the line-end conversion.  It has been
+   corrected.
+
+Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/2.8.3.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.8.3.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..fedd9968e5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.8.3.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,101 @@
+Git v2.8.3 Release Notes
+========================
+
+Fixes since v2.8.2
+------------------
+
+ * "git send-email" now uses a more readable timestamps when
+   formulating a message ID.
+
+ * The repository set-up sequence has been streamlined (the biggest
+   change is that there is no longer git_config_early()), so that we
+   do not attempt to look into refs/* when we know we do not have a
+   Git repository.
+
+ * When "git worktree" feature is in use, "git branch -d" allowed
+   deletion of a branch that is checked out in another worktree
+
+ * When "git worktree" feature is in use, "git branch -m" renamed a
+   branch that is checked out in another worktree without adjusting
+   the HEAD symbolic ref for the worktree.
+
+ * "git format-patch --help" showed `-s` and `--no-patch` as if these
+   are valid options to the command.  We already hide `--patch` option
+   from the documentation, because format-patch is about showing the
+   diff, and the documentation now hides these options as well.
+
+ * A change back in version 2.7 to "git branch" broke display of a
+   symbolic ref in a non-standard place in the refs/ hierarchy (we
+   expect symbolic refs to appear in refs/remotes/*/HEAD to point at
+   the primary branch the remote has, and as .git/HEAD to point at the
+   branch we locally checked out).
+
+ * A partial rewrite of "git submodule" in the 2.7 timeframe changed
+   the way the gitdir: pointer in the submodules point at the real
+   repository location to use absolute paths by accident.  This has
+   been corrected.
+
+ * "git commit" misbehaved in a few minor ways when an empty message
+   is given via -m '', all of which has been corrected.
+
+ * Support for CRAM-MD5 authentication method in "git imap-send" did
+   not work well.
+
+ * The socks5:// proxy support added back in 2.6.4 days was not aware
+   that socks5h:// proxies behave differently.
+
+ * "git config" had a codepath that tried to pass a NULL to
+   printf("%s"), which nobody seems to have noticed.
+
+ * On Cygwin, object creation uses the "create a temporary and then
+   rename it to the final name" pattern, not "create a temporary,
+   hardlink it to the final name and then unlink the temporary"
+   pattern.
+
+   This is necessary to use Git on Windows shared directories, and is
+   already enabled for the MinGW and plain Windows builds.  It also
+   has been used in Cygwin packaged versions of Git for quite a while.
+   See http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/291853
+   and http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/275680.
+
+ * "git replace -e" did not honour "core.editor" configuration.
+
+ * Upcoming OpenSSL 1.1.0 will break compilation b updating a few APIs
+   we use in imap-send, which has been adjusted for the change.
+
+ * "git submodule" reports the paths of submodules the command
+   recurses into, but this was incorrect when the command was not run
+   from the root level of the superproject.
+
+ * The test scripts for "git p4" (but not "git p4" implementation
+   itself) has been updated so that they would work even on a system
+   where the installed version of Python is python 3.
+
+ * The "user.useConfigOnly" configuration variable makes it an error
+   if users do not explicitly set user.name and user.email.  However,
+   its check was not done early enough and allowed another error to
+   trigger, reporting that the default value we guessed from the
+   system setting was unusable.  This was a suboptimal end-user
+   experience as we want the users to set user.name/user.email without
+   relying on the auto-detection at all.
+
+ * "git mv old new" did not adjust the path for a submodule that lives
+   as a subdirectory inside old/ directory correctly.
+
+ * "git push" from a corrupt repository that attempts to push a large
+   number of refs deadlocked; the thread to relay rejection notices
+   for these ref updates blocked on writing them to the main thread,
+   after the main thread at the receiving end notices that the push
+   failed and decides not to read these notices and return a failure.
+
+ * A question by "git send-email" to ask the identity of the sender
+   has been updated.
+
+ * Recent update to Git LFS broke "git p4" by changing the output from
+   its "lfs pointer" subcommand.
+
+ * Some multi-byte encoding can have a backslash byte as a later part
+   of one letter, which would confuse "highlight" filter used in
+   gitweb.
+
+Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/2.8.4.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.8.4.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..6005548fd6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.8.4.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+Git v2.8.4 Release Notes
+========================
+
+Fixes since v2.8.3
+------------------
+
+ * Documentation for "git merge --verify-signatures" has been updated
+   to clarify that the signature of only the commit at the tip is
+   verified.  Also the phrasing used for signature and key validity is
+   adjusted to align with that used by OpenPGP.
+
+ * On Windows, .git and optionally any files whose name starts with a
+   dot are now marked as hidden, with a core.hideDotFiles knob to
+   customize this behaviour.
+
+ * Portability enhancement for "rebase -i" to help platforms whose
+   shell does not like "for i in <empty>" (which is not POSIX-kosher).
+
+ * "git fsck" learned to catch NUL byte in a commit object as
+   potential error and warn.
+
+ * CI test was taught to build documentation pages.
+
+ * Many 'linkgit:<git documentation page>' references were broken,
+   which are all fixed with this.
+
+Also contains other minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.