14 files changed, 1106 insertions, 7 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/1.7.7.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/1.7.7.txt
index 7655cccfaa..6eff128c80 100644
--- a/Documentation/RelNotes/1.7.7.txt
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/1.7.7.txt
@@ -84,7 +84,7 @@ Updates since v1.7.6
    logic used by "git diff" to determine the hunk header.
 
  * Invoking the low-level "git http-fetch" without "-a" option (which
-   git itself never did---normal users should not have to worry about
+   git itself never did--normal users should not have to worry about
    this) is now deprecated.
 
  * The "--decorate" option to "git log" and its family learned to
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.3.1.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.3.1.txt
index fc3ea185a5..986637b755 100644
--- a/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.3.1.txt
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.3.1.txt
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 Git v1.8.3.1 Release Notes
-========================
+==========================
 
 Fixes since v1.8.3
 ------------------
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.4.1.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.4.1.txt
index 3aa25a2743..96090ef599 100644
--- a/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.4.1.txt
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.4.1.txt
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 Git v1.8.4.1 Release Notes
-========================
+==========================
 
 Fixes since v1.8.4
 ------------------
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.4.2.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.4.2.txt
index 9adccb1efb..bf6fb1a023 100644
--- a/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.4.2.txt
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.4.2.txt
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 Git v1.8.4.2 Release Notes
-========================
+==========================
 
 Fixes since v1.8.4.1
 --------------------
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.4.3.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.4.3.txt
index 03f3d17751..267a1b34b4 100644
--- a/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.4.3.txt
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.4.3.txt
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 Git v1.8.4.3 Release Notes
-========================
+==========================
 
 Fixes since v1.8.4.2
 --------------------
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.4.4.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.4.4.txt
index 7bc4c5dcc0..a7c1ce15c0 100644
--- a/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.4.4.txt
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/1.8.4.4.txt
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 Git v1.8.4.4 Release Notes
-========================
+==========================
 
 Fixes since v1.8.4.3
 --------------------
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/1.9.0.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/1.9.0.txt
index 752d79127a..4e4b88aa5c 100644
--- a/Documentation/RelNotes/1.9.0.txt
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/1.9.0.txt
@@ -177,7 +177,7 @@ Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
  * The naming convention of the packfiles has been updated; it used to
    be based on the enumeration of names of the objects that are
    contained in the pack, but now it also depends on how the packed
-   result is represented---packing the same set of objects using
+   result is represented--packing the same set of objects using
    different settings (or delta order) would produce a pack with
    different name.
 
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.0.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..7288aaf716
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,370 @@
+Git 2.6 Release Notes
+=====================
+
+Updates since v2.5
+------------------
+
+UI, Workflows & Features
+
+ * An asterisk as a substring (as opposed to the entirety) of a path
+   component for both side of a refspec, e.g.
+   "refs/heads/o*:refs/remotes/heads/i*", is now allowed.
+
+ * New userdiff pattern definition for fountain screenwriting markup
+   format has been added.
+
+ * "git log" and friends learned a new "--date=format:..." option to
+   format timestamps using system's strftime(3).
+
+ * "git fast-import" learned to respond to the get-mark command via
+   its cat-blob-fd interface.
+
+ * "git rebase -i" learned "drop commit-object-name subject" command
+   as another way to skip replaying of a commit.
+
+ * A new configuration variable can enable "--follow" automatically
+   when "git log" is run with one pathspec argument.
+
+ * "git status" learned to show a more detailed information regarding
+   the "rebase -i" session in progress.
+
+ * "git cat-file" learned "--batch-all-objects" option to enumerate all
+   available objects in the repository more quickly than "rev-list
+   --all --objects" (the output includes unreachable objects, though).
+
+ * "git fsck" learned to ignore errors on a set of known-to-be-bad
+   objects, and also allows the warning levels of various kinds of
+   non-critical breakages to be tweaked.
+
+ * "git rebase -i"'s list of todo is made configurable.
+
+ * "git send-email" now performs alias-expansion on names that are
+   given via --cccmd, etc.
+
+ * An environment variable GIT_REPLACE_REF_BASE tells Git to look into
+   refs hierarchy other than refs/replace/ for the object replacement
+   data.
+
+ * Allow untracked cache (experimental) to be used when sparse
+   checkout (experimental) is also in use.
+
+ * "git pull --rebase" has been taught to pay attention to
+   rebase.autostash configuration.
+
+ * The command-line completion script (in contrib/) has been updated.
+
+ * A negative !ref entry in multi-value transfer.hideRefs
+   configuration can be used to say "don't hide this one".
+
+ * After "git am" without "-3" stops, running "git am -3" pays attention
+   to "-3" only for the patch that caused the original invocation
+   to stop.
+
+ * When linked worktree is used, simultaneous "notes merge" instances
+   for the same ref in refs/notes/* are prevented from stomping on
+   each other.
+
+ * "git send-email" learned a new option --smtp-auth to limit the SMTP
+   AUTH mechanisms to be used to a subset of what the system library
+   supports.
+
+ * A new configuration variable http.sslVersion can be used to specify
+   what specific version of SSL/TLS to use to make a connection.
+
+ * "git notes merge" can be told with "--strategy=<how>" option how to
+   automatically handle conflicts; this can now be configured by
+   setting notes.mergeStrategy configuration variable.
+
+ * "git log --cc" did not show any patch, even though most of the time
+   the user meant "git log --cc -p -m" to see patch output for commits
+   with a single parent, and combined diff for merge commits.  The
+   command is taught to DWIM "--cc" (without "--raw" and other forms
+   of output specification) to "--cc -p -m".
+
+ * "git config --list" output was hard to parse when values consist of
+   multiple lines.  "--name-only" option is added to help this.
+
+ * A handful of usability & cosmetic fixes to gitk and l10n updates.
+
+ * A completely empty e-mail address <> is now allowed in the authors
+   file used by git-svn, to match the way it accepts the output from
+   authors-prog.
+
+
+Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
+
+ * In preparation for allowing different "backends" to store the refs
+   in a way different from the traditional "one ref per file in
+   $GIT_DIR or in a $GIT_DIR/packed-refs file" filesystem storage,
+   direct filesystem access to ref-like things like CHERRY_PICK_HEAD
+   from scripts and programs has been reduced.
+
+ * Computation of untracked status indicator by bash prompt
+   script (in contrib/) has been optimized.
+
+ * Memory use reduction when commit-slab facility is used to annotate
+   sparsely (which is not recommended in the first place).
+
+ * Clean up refs API and make "git clone" less intimate with the
+   implementation detail.
+
+ * "git pull" was reimplemented in C.
+
+ * The packet tracing machinery allows to capture an incoming pack
+   data to a file for debugging.
+
+ * Move machinery to parse human-readable scaled numbers like 1k, 4M,
+   and 2G as an option parameter's value from pack-objects to
+   parse-options API, to make it available to other codepaths.
+
+ * "git verify-tag" and "git verify-commit" have been taught to share
+   more code, and then learned to optionally show the verification
+   message from the underlying GPG implementation.
+
+ * Various enhancements around "git am" reading patches generated by
+   foreign SCM have been made.
+
+ * Ref listing by "git branch -l" and "git tag -l" commands has
+   started to be rebuilt, based on the for-each-ref machinery.
+
+ * The code to perform multi-tree merges has been taught to repopulate
+   the cache-tree upon a successful merge into the index, so that
+   subsequent "diff-index --cached" (hence "status") and "write-tree"
+   (hence "commit") will go faster.
+
+   The same logic in "git checkout" may now be removed, but that is a
+   separate issue.
+
+ * Tests that assume how reflogs are represented on the filesystem too
+   much have been corrected.
+
+ * "git am" has been rewritten in "C".
+
+ * git_path() and mkpath() are handy helper functions but it is easy
+   to misuse, as the callers need to be careful to keep the number of
+   active results below 4.  Their uses have been reduced.
+
+ * The "lockfile" API has been rebuilt on top of a new "tempfile" API.
+
+ * To prepare for allowing a different "ref" backend to be plugged in
+   to the system, update_ref()/delete_ref() have been taught about
+   ref-like things like MERGE_HEAD that are per-worktree (they will
+   always be written to the filesystem inside $GIT_DIR).
+
+ * The gitmodules API that is accessed from the C code learned to
+   cache stuff lazily.
+
+
+Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
+
+
+Fixes since v2.5
+----------------
+
+Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.5 in the maintenance
+track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
+notes for details).
+
+ * "git subtree" (in contrib/) depended on "git log" output to be
+   stable, which was a no-no.  Apply a workaround to force a
+   particular date format.
+   (merge e7aac44 da/subtree-date-confusion later to maint).
+
+ * An attempt to delete a ref by pushing into a repository whose HEAD
+   symbolic reference points at an unborn branch that cannot be
+   created due to ref D/F conflict (e.g. refs/heads/a/b exists, HEAD
+   points at refs/heads/a) failed.
+   (merge b112b14 jx/do-not-crash-receive-pack-wo-head later to maint).
+
+ * The low-level "git send-pack" did not honor 'user.signingkey'
+   configuration variable when sending a signed-push.
+   (merge d830d39 db/send-pack-user-signingkey later to maint).
+
+ * "sparse checkout" misbehaved for a path that is excluded from the
+   checkout when switching between branches that differ at the path.
+   (merge 7d78241 as/sparse-checkout-removal later to maint).
+
+ * An experimental "untracked cache" feature used uname(2) in a
+   slightly unportable way.
+   (merge 100e433 cb/uname-in-untracked later to maint).
+
+ * A "rebase" replays changes of the local branch on top of something
+   else, as such they are placed in stage #3 and referred to as
+   "theirs", while the changes in the new base, typically a foreign
+   work, are placed in stage #2 and referred to as "ours".  Clarify
+   the "checkout --ours/--theirs".
+   (merge f303016 se/doc-checkout-ours-theirs later to maint).
+
+ * The "rev-parse --parseopt" mode parsed the option specification
+   and the argument hint in a strange way to allow '=' and other
+   special characters in the option name while forbidding them from
+   the argument hint.  This made it impossible to define an option
+   like "--pair <key>=<value>" with "pair=key=value" specification,
+   which instead would have defined a "--pair=key <value>" option.
+   (merge 2d893df ib/scripted-parse-opt-better-hint-string later to maint).
+
+ * Often a fast-import stream builds a new commit on top of the
+   previous commit it built, and it often unconditionally emits a
+   "from" command to specify the first parent, which can be omitted in
+   such a case.  This caused fast-import to forget the tree of the
+   previous commit and then re-read it from scratch, which was
+   inefficient.  Optimize for this common case.
+   (merge 0df3245 mh/fast-import-optimize-current-from later to maint).
+
+ * Running an aliased command from a subdirectory when the .git thing
+   in the working tree is a gitfile pointing elsewhere did not work.
+   (merge d95138e nd/export-worktree later to maint).
+
+ * "Is this subdirectory a separate repository that should not be
+   touched?" check "git clean" was inefficient.  This was replaced
+   with a more optimized check.
+   (merge fbf2fec ee/clean-remove-dirs later to maint).
+
+ * The "new-worktree-mode" hack in "checkout" that was added in
+   nd/multiple-work-trees topic has been removed by updating the
+   implementation of new "worktree add".
+   (merge 65f9b75 es/worktree-add-cleanup later to maint).
+
+ * Remove remaining cruft from  "git checkout --to", which
+   transitioned to "git worktree add".
+   (merge 114ff88 es/worktree-add later to maint).
+
+ * An off-by-one error made "git remote" to mishandle a remote with a
+   single letter nickname.
+   (merge bc598c3 mh/get-remote-group-fix later to maint).
+
+ * "git clone $URL", when cloning from a site whose sole purpose is to
+   host a single repository (hence, no path after <scheme>://<site>/),
+   tried to use the site name as the new repository name, but did not
+   remove username or password when <site> part was of the form
+   <user>@<pass>:<host>.  The code is taught to redact these.
+   (merge adef956 ps/guess-repo-name-at-root later to maint).
+
+ * Running tests with the "-x" option to make them verbose had some
+   unpleasant interactions with other features of the test suite.
+   (merge 9b5fe78 jk/test-with-x later to maint).
+
+ * t1509 test that requires a dedicated VM environment had some
+   bitrot, which has been corrected.
+   (merge faacc5a ps/t1509-chroot-test-fixup later to maint).
+
+ * "git pull" in recent releases of Git has a regression in the code
+   that allows custom path to the --upload-pack=<program>.  This has
+   been corrected.
+
+   Note that this is irrelevant for 'master' with "git pull" rewritten
+   in C.
+   (merge 13e0e28 mm/pull-upload-pack later to maint).
+
+ * When trying to see that an object does not exist, a state errno
+   leaked from our "first try to open a packfile with O_NOATIME and
+   then if it fails retry without it" logic on a system that refuses
+   O_NOATIME.  This confused us and caused us to die, saying that the
+   packfile is unreadable, when we should have just reported that the
+   object does not exist in that packfile to the caller.
+   (merge dff6f28 cb/open-noatime-clear-errno later to maint).
+
+ * The codepath to produce error messages had a hard-coded limit to
+   the size of the message, primarily to avoid memory allocation while
+   calling die().
+   (merge f4c3edc jk/long-error-messages later to maint).
+
+ * strbuf_read() used to have one extra iteration (and an unnecessary
+   strbuf_grow() of 8kB), which was eliminated.
+   (merge 3ebbd00 jh/strbuf-read-use-read-in-full later to maint).
+
+ * We rewrote one of the build scripts in Perl but this reimplements
+   in Bourne shell.
+   (merge 57cee8a sg/help-group later to maint).
+
+ * The experimental untracked-cache feature were buggy when paths with
+   a few levels of subdirectories are involved.
+   (merge 73f9145 dt/untracked-subdir later to maint).
+
+ * "interpret-trailers" helper mistook a single-liner log message that
+   has a colon as the end of existing trailer.
+
+ * The "interpret-trailers" helper mistook a multi-paragraph title of
+   a commit log message with a colon in it as the end of the trailer
+   block.
+   (merge 5c99995 cc/trailers-corner-case-fix later to maint).
+
+ * "git describe" without argument defaulted to describe the HEAD
+   commit, but "git describe --contains" didn't.  Arguably, in a
+   repository used for active development, such defaulting would not
+   be very useful as the tip of branch is typically not tagged, but it
+   is better to be consistent.
+   (merge 2bd0706 sg/describe-contains later to maint).
+
+ * The client side codepaths in "git push" have been cleaned up
+   and the user can request to perform an optional "signed push",
+   i.e. sign only when the other end accepts signed push.
+   (merge 68c757f db/push-sign-if-asked later to maint).
+
+ * Because the configuration system does not allow "alias.0foo" and
+   "pager.0foo" as the configuration key, the user cannot use '0foo'
+   as a custom command name anyway, but "git 0foo" tried to look these
+   keys up and emitted useless warnings before saying '0foo is not a
+   git command'.  These warning messages have been squelched.
+   (merge 9e9de18 jk/fix-alias-pager-config-key-warnings later to maint).
+
+ * "git rev-list" does not take "--notes" option, but did not complain
+   when one is given.
+   (merge 2aea7a5 jk/rev-list-has-no-notes later to maint).
+
+ * When re-priming the cache-tree opportunistically while committing
+   the in-core index as-is, we mistakenly invalidated the in-core
+   index too aggressively, causing the experimental split-index code
+   to unnecessarily rewrite the on-disk index file(s).
+   (merge 475a344 dt/commit-preserve-base-index-upon-opportunistic-cache-tree-update later to maint).
+
+ * "git archive" did not use zip64 extension when creating an archive
+   with more than 64k entries, which nobody should need, right ;-)?
+   (merge 88329ca rs/archive-zip-many later to maint).
+
+ * The code in "multiple-worktree" support that attempted to recover
+   from an inconsistent state updated an incorrect file.
+   (merge 82fde87 nd/fixup-linked-gitdir later to maint).
+
+ * On case insensitive systems, "git p4" did not work well with client
+   specs.
+
+ * "git init empty && git -C empty log" said "bad default revision 'HEAD'",
+   which was found to be a bit confusing to new users.
+   (merge ce11360 jk/log-missing-default-HEAD later to maint).
+
+ * Recent versions of scripted "git am" has a performance regression in
+   "git am --skip" codepath, which no longer exists in the built-in
+   version on the 'master' front.  Fix the regression in the last
+   scripted version that appear in 2.5.x maintenance track and older.
+   (merge b9d6689 js/maint-am-skip-performance-regression later to maint).
+
+ * The branch descriptions that are set with "git branch --edit-description"
+   option were used in many places but they weren't clearly documented.
+   (merge 561d2b7 po/doc-branch-desc later to maint).
+
+ * Code cleanups and documentation updates.
+   (merge 1c601af es/doc-clean-outdated-tools later to maint).
+   (merge 3581304 kn/tag-doc-fix later to maint).
+   (merge 3a59e59 kb/i18n-doc later to maint).
+   (merge 45abdee sb/remove-unused-var-from-builtin-add later to maint).
+   (merge 14691e3 sb/parse-options-codeformat later to maint).
+   (merge 4a6ada3 ad/bisect-cleanup later to maint).
+   (merge da4c5ad ta/docfix-index-format-tech later to maint).
+   (merge ae25fd3 sb/check-return-from-read-ref later to maint).
+   (merge b3325df nd/dwim-wildcards-as-pathspecs later to maint).
+   (merge 7aa9b9b sg/wt-status-header-inclusion later to maint).
+   (merge f04c690 as/docfix-reflog-expire-unreachable later to maint).
+   (merge 1269847 sg/t3020-typofix later to maint).
+   (merge 8b54c23 jc/calloc-pathspec later to maint).
+   (merge a6926b8 po/po-readme later to maint).
+   (merge 54d160e ss/fix-config-fd-leak later to maint).
+   (merge b80fa84 ah/submodule-typofix-in-error later to maint).
+   (merge 99885bc ah/reflog-typofix-in-error later to maint).
+   (merge 9476c2c ah/read-tree-usage-string later to maint).
+   (merge b8c1d27 ah/pack-objects-usage-strings later to maint).
+   (merge 486e1e1 br/svn-doc-include-paths-config later to maint).
+   (merge 1733ed3 ee/clean-test-fixes later to maint).
+   (merge 5fcadc3 gb/apply-comment-typofix later to maint).
+   (merge b894d3e mp/t7060-diff-index-test later to maint).
+   (merge d238710 as/config-doc-markup-fix later to maint).
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.1.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.1.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..1e51363e3c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.1.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+Git v2.6.1 Release Notes
+========================
+
+Fixes since v2.6
+----------------
+
+ * xdiff code we use to generate diffs is not prepared to handle
+   extremely large files.  It uses "int" in many places, which can
+   overflow if we have a very large number of lines or even bytes in
+   our input files, for example.  Cap the input size to soemwhere
+   around 1GB for now.
+
+ * Some protocols (like git-remote-ext) can execute arbitrary code
+   found in the URL.  The URLs that submodules use may come from
+   arbitrary sources (e.g., .gitmodules files in a remote
+   repository), and can hurt those who blindly enable recursive
+   fetch.  Restrict the allowed protocols to well known and safe
+   ones.
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.2.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.2.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..5b65e35245
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.2.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,65 @@
+Git v2.6.2 Release Notes
+========================
+
+Fixes since v2.6.1
+------------------
+
+ * There were some classes of errors that "git fsck" diagnosed to its
+   standard error that did not cause it to exit with non-zero status.
+
+ * A test script for the HTTP service had a timing dependent bug,
+   which was fixed.
+
+ * Performance-measurement tests did not work without an installed Git.
+
+ * On a case insensitive filesystems, setting GIT_WORK_TREE variable
+   using a random cases that does not agree with what the filesystem
+   thinks confused Git that it wasn't inside the working tree.
+
+ * When "git am" was rewritten as a built-in, it stopped paying
+   attention to user.signingkey, which was fixed.
+
+ * After "git checkout --detach", "git status" reported a fairly
+   useless "HEAD detached at HEAD", instead of saying at which exact
+   commit.
+
+ * "git rebase -i" had a minor regression recently, which stopped
+   considering a line that begins with an indented '#' in its insn
+   sheet not a comment, which is now fixed.
+
+ * Description of the "log.follow" configuration variable in "git log"
+   documentation is now also copied to "git config" documentation.
+
+ * Allocation related functions and stdio are unsafe things to call
+   inside a signal handler, and indeed killing the pager can cause
+   glibc to deadlock waiting on allocation mutex as our signal handler
+   tries to free() some data structures in wait_for_pager().  Reduce
+   these unsafe calls.
+
+ * The way how --ref/--notes to specify the notes tree reference are
+   DWIMmed was not clearly documented.
+
+ * Customization to change the behaviour with "make -w" and "make -s"
+   in our Makefile was broken when they were used together.
+
+ * The Makefile always runs the library archiver with hardcoded "crs"
+   options, which was inconvenient for exotic platforms on which
+   people want to use programs with totally different set of command
+   line options.
+
+ * The ssh transport, just like any other transport over the network,
+   did not clear GIT_* environment variables, but it is possible to
+   use SendEnv and AcceptEnv to leak them to the remote invocation of
+   Git, which is not a good idea at all.  Explicitly clear them just
+   like we do for the local transport.
+
+ * "git blame --first-parent v1.0..v2.0" was not rejected but did not
+   limit the blame to commits on the first parent chain.
+
+ * Very small number of options take a parameter that is optional
+   (which is not a great UI element as they can only appear at the end
+   of the command line).  Add notice to documentation of each and
+   every one of them.
+
+Also contains typofixes, documentation updates and trivial code
+clean-ups.
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.3.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.3.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..fc6fe1711f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.3.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,111 @@
+Git v2.6.3 Release Notes
+========================
+
+Fixes since v2.6.2
+------------------
+
+ * The error message from "git blame --contents --reverse" incorrectly
+   talked about "--contents --children".
+
+ * "git merge-file" tried to signal how many conflicts it found, which
+   obviously would not work well when there are too many of them.
+
+ * The name-hash subsystem that is used to cope with case insensitive
+   filesystems keeps track of directories and their on-filesystem
+   cases for all the paths in the index by holding a pointer to a
+   randomly chosen cache entry that is inside the directory (for its
+   ce->ce_name component).  This pointer was not updated even when the
+   cache entry was removed from the index, leading to use after free.
+   This was fixed by recording the path for each directory instead of
+   borrowing cache entries and restructuring the API somewhat.
+
+ * When the "git am" command was reimplemented in C, "git am -3" had a
+   small regression where it is aborted in its error handling codepath
+   when underlying merge-recursive failed in some ways.
+
+ * The synopsis text and the usage string of subcommands that read
+   list of things from the standard input are often shown as if they
+   only take input from a file on a filesystem, which was misleading.
+
+ * A couple of commands still showed "[options]" in their usage string
+   to note where options should come on their command line, but we
+   spell that "[<options>]" in most places these days.
+
+ * The submodule code has been taught to work better with separate
+   work trees created via "git worktree add".
+
+ * When "git gc --auto" is backgrounded, its diagnosis message is
+   lost.  It now is saved to a file in $GIT_DIR and is shown next time
+   the "gc --auto" is run.
+
+ * Work around "git p4" failing when the P4 depot records the contents
+   in UTF-16 without UTF-16 BOM.
+
+ * Recent update to "rebase -i" that tries to sanity check the edited
+   insn sheet before it uses it has become too picky on Windows where
+   CRLF left by the editor is turned into a trailing CR on the line
+   read via the "read" built-in command.
+
+ * "git clone --dissociate" runs a big "git repack" process at the
+   end, and it helps to close file descriptors that are open on the
+   packs and their idx files before doing so on filesystems that
+   cannot remove a file that is still open.
+
+ * Correct "git p4 --detect-labels" so that it does not fail to create
+   a tag that points at a commit that is also being imported.
+
+ * The internal stripspace() function has been moved to where it
+   logically belongs to, i.e. strbuf API, and the command line parser
+   of "git stripspace" has been updated to use the parse_options API.
+
+ * Prepare for Git on-disk repository representation to undergo
+   backward incompatible changes by introducing a new repository
+   format version "1", with an extension mechanism.
+
+ * "git gc" used to barf when a symbolic ref has gone dangling
+   (e.g. the branch that used to be your upstream's default when you
+   cloned from it is now gone, and you did "fetch --prune").
+
+ * The normalize_ceiling_entry() function does not muck with the end
+   of the path it accepts, and the real world callers do rely on that,
+   but a test insisted that the function drops a trailing slash.
+
+ * "git gc" is safe to run anytime only because it has the built-in
+   grace period to protect young objects.  In order to run with no
+   grace period, the user must make sure that the repository is
+   quiescent.
+
+ * A recent "filter-branch --msg-filter" broke skipping of the commit
+   object header, which is fixed.
+
+ * "git --literal-pathspecs add -u/-A" without any command line
+   argument misbehaved ever since Git 2.0.
+
+ * Merging a branch that removes a path and another that changes the
+   mode bits on the same path should have conflicted at the path, but
+   it didn't and silently favoured the removal.
+
+ * "git imap-send" did not compile well with older version of cURL library.
+
+ * The linkage order of libraries was wrong in places around libcurl.
+
+ * It was not possible to use a repository-lookalike created by "git
+   worktree add" as a local source of "git clone".
+
+ * When "git send-email" wanted to talk over Net::SMTP::SSL,
+   Net::Cmd::datasend() did not like to be fed too many bytes at the
+   same time and failed to send messages.  Send the payload one line
+   at a time to work around the problem.
+
+ * We peek objects from submodule's object store by linking it to the
+   list of alternate object databases, but the code to do so forgot to
+   correctly initialize the list.
+
+ * "git status --branch --short" accessed beyond the constant string
+   "HEAD", which has been corrected.
+
+ * "git daemon" uses "run_command()" without "finish_command()", so it
+   needs to release resources itself, which it forgot to do.
+
+Also contains typofixes, documentation updates and trivial code
+clean-ups.
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.4.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.4.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..b0256a2dc9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.4.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,63 @@
+Git v2.6.4 Release Notes
+========================
+
+Fixes since v2.6.3
+------------------
+
+ * The "configure" script did not test for -lpthread correctly, which
+   upset some linkers.
+
+ * Add support for talking http/https over socks proxy.
+
+ * Portability fix for Windows, which may rewrite $SHELL variable using
+   non-POSIX paths.
+
+ * We now consistently allow all hooks to ignore their standard input,
+   rather than having git complain of SIGPIPE.
+
+ * Fix shell quoting in contrib script.
+
+ * Test portability fix for a topic in v2.6.1.
+
+ * Allow tilde-expansion in some http config variables.
+
+ * Give a useful special case "diff/show --word-diff-regex=." as an
+   example in the documentation.
+
+ * Fix for a corner case in filter-branch.
+
+ * Make git-p4 work on a detached head.
+
+ * Documentation clarification for "check-ignore" without "--verbose".
+
+ * Just like the working tree is cleaned up when the user cancelled
+   submission in P4Submit.applyCommit(), clean up the mess if "p4
+   submit" fails.
+
+ * Having a leftover .idx file without corresponding .pack file in
+   the repository hurts performance; "git gc" learned to prune them.
+
+ * The code to prepare the working tree side of temporary directory
+   for the "dir-diff" feature forgot that symbolic links need not be
+   copied (or symlinked) to the temporary area, as the code already
+   special cases and overwrites them.  Besides, it was wrong to try
+   computing the object name of the target of symbolic link, which may
+   not even exist or may be a directory.
+
+ * There was no way to defeat a configured rebase.autostash variable
+   from the command line, as "git rebase --no-autostash" was missing.
+
+ * Allow "git interpret-trailers" to run outside of a Git repository.
+
+ * Produce correct "dirty" marker for shell prompts, even when we
+   are on an orphan or an unborn branch.
+
+ * Some corner cases have been fixed in string-matching done in "git
+   status".
+
+ * Apple's common crypto implementation of SHA1_Update() does not take
+   more than 4GB at a time, and we now have a compile-time workaround
+   for it.
+
+Also contains typofixes, documentation updates and trivial code
+clean-ups.
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.5.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.5.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..f0924b62e0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.6.5.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,58 @@
+Git v2.6.5 Release Notes
+========================
+
+Fixes since v2.6.4
+------------------
+
+ * Because "test_when_finished" in our test framework queues the
+   clean-up tasks to be done in a shell variable, it should not be
+   used inside a subshell.  Add a mechanism to allow 'bash' to catch
+   such uses, and fix the ones that were found.
+
+ * Update "git subtree" (in contrib/) so that it can take whitespaces
+   in the pathnames, not only in the in-tree pathname but the name of
+   the directory that the repository is in.
+
+ * Cosmetic improvement to lock-file error messages.
+
+ * mark_tree_uninteresting() has code to handle the case where it gets
+   passed a NULL pointer in its 'tree' parameter, but the function had
+   'object = &tree->object' assignment before checking if tree is
+   NULL.  This gives a compiler an excuse to declare that tree will
+   never be NULL and apply a wrong optimization.  Avoid it.
+
+ * The helper used to iterate over loose object directories to prune
+   stale objects did not closedir() immediately when it is done with a
+   directory--a callback such as the one used for "git prune" may want
+   to do rmdir(), but it would fail on open directory on platforms
+   such as WinXP.
+
+ * "git p4" used to import Perforce CLs that touch only paths outside
+   the client spec as empty commits.  It has been corrected to ignore
+   them instead, with a new configuration git-p4.keepEmptyCommits as a
+   backward compatibility knob.
+
+ * The exit code of git-fsck did not reflect some types of errors
+   found in packed objects, which has been corrected.
+
+ * The completion script (in contrib/) used to list "git column"
+   (which is not an end-user facing command) as one of the choices
+
+ * Improve error reporting when SMTP TLS fails.
+
+ * When getpwuid() on the system returned NULL (e.g. the user is not
+   in the /etc/passwd file or other uid-to-name mappings), the
+   codepath to find who the user is to record it in the reflog barfed
+   and died.  Loosen the check in this codepath, which already accepts
+   questionable ident string (e.g. host part of the e-mail address is
+   obviously bogus), and in general when we operate fmt_ident() function
+   in non-strict mode.
+
+ * "git symbolic-ref" forgot to report a failure with its exit status.
+
+ * History traversal with "git log --source" that starts with an
+   annotated tag failed to report the tag as "source", due to an
+   old regression in the command line parser back in v2.2 days.
+
+Also contains typofixes, documentation updates and trivial code
+clean-ups.
diff --git a/Documentation/RelNotes/2.7.0.txt b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.7.0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..563dadc57e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/RelNotes/2.7.0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,414 @@
+Git 2.7 Release Notes
+=====================
+
+Updates since v2.6
+------------------
+
+UI, Workflows & Features
+
+ * The appearance of "gitk", particularly on high DPI monitors, have
+   been improved.  "gitk" also comes with an undated translation for
+   Swedish and Japanese.
+
+ * "git remote" learned "get-url" subcommand to show the URL for a
+   given remote name used for fetching and pushing.
+
+ * There was no way to defeat a configured rebase.autostash variable
+   from the command line, as "git rebase --no-autostash" was missing.
+
+ * "git log --date=local" used to only show the normal (default)
+   format in the local timezone.  The command learned to take 'local'
+   as an instruction to use the local timezone with other formats,
+
+ * The refs used during a "git bisect" session is now per-worktree so
+   that independent bisect sessions can be done in different worktrees
+   created with "git worktree add".
+
+ * Users who are too busy to type three extra keystrokes to ask for
+   "git stash show -p" can now set stash.showPatch configuration
+   variable to true to always see the actual patch, not just the list
+   of paths affected with feel for the extent of damage via diffstat.
+
+ * "quiltimport" allows to specify the series file by honoring the
+   $QUILT_SERIES environment and also --series command line option.
+
+ * The use of 'good/bad' in "git bisect" made it confusing to use when
+   hunting for a state change that is not a regression (e.g. bugfix).
+   The command learned 'old/new' and then allows the end user to
+   say e.g. "bisect start --term-old=fast --term-new=slow" to find a
+   performance regression.
+
+ * "git interpret-trailers" can now run outside of a Git repository.
+
+ * "git p4" learned to reencode the pathname it uses to communicate
+   with the p4 depot with a new option.
+
+ * Give progress meter to "git filter-branch".
+
+ * Allow a later "!/abc/def" to override an earlier "/abc" that
+   appears in the same .gitignore file to make it easier to express
+   "everything in /abc directory is ignored, except for ...".
+
+ * Teach "git p4" to send large blobs outside the repository by
+   talking to Git LFS.
+
+ * Prepare for Git on-disk repository representation to undergo
+   backward incompatible changes by introducing a new repository
+   format version "1", with an extension mechanism.
+
+ * "git worktree" learned a "list" subcommand.
+
+ * "git clone --dissociate" learned that it can be used even when
+   "--reference" was not used at the same time.
+
+ * "git blame" learnt to take "--first-parent" and "--reverse" at the
+   same time when it makes sense.
+
+ * "git checkout" did not follow the usual "--[no-]progress"
+   convention and implemented only "--quiet" that is essentially
+   a superset of "--no-progress".  Extend the command to support the
+   usual "--[no-]progress".
+
+ * The semantics of transfer.hideRefs configuration variable have been
+   extended to work better with the ref "namespace" feature that lets
+   you throw unrelated bunches of repositories in a single physical
+   repository and virtually serve them as separate ones.
+
+ * send-email config variables whose values are pathnames now go
+   through the ~username/ expansion.
+
+ * bash completion learnt to TAB-complete recipient addresses given
+   to send-email.
+
+ * The credential-cache daemon can be told to ignore SIGHUP to work
+   around issue when running Git from inside emacs.
+
+ * "git push" learned new configuration for doing "--recurse-submodules"
+   on each push.
+
+ * "format-patch" has learned a new option to zero-out the commit
+   object name on the mbox "From " line.
+
+
+Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
+
+ * The infrastructure to rewrite "git submodule" in C is being built
+   incrementally.  Let's polish these early parts well enough and make
+   them graduate to 'next' and 'master', so that the more involved
+   follow-up can start cooking on a solid ground.
+
+ * Some features from "git tag -l" and "git branch -l" have been made
+   available to "git for-each-ref" so that eventually the unified
+   implementation can be shared across all three.  The version merged
+   to the 'master' branch earlier had a performance regression in "tag
+   --contains", which has since been corrected.
+
+ * Because "test_when_finished" in our test framework queues the
+   clean-up tasks to be done in a shell variable, it should not be
+   used inside a subshell.  Add a mechanism to allow 'bash' to catch
+   such uses, and fix the ones that were found.
+
+ * The debugging infrastructure for pkt-line based communication has
+   been improved to mark the side-band communication specifically.
+
+ * Update "git branch" that list existing branches, using the
+   ref-filter API that is shared with "git tag" and "git
+   for-each-ref".
+
+ * The test for various line-ending conversions has been enhanced.
+
+ * A few test scripts around "git p4" have been improved for
+   portability.
+
+ * Many allocations that is manually counted (correctly) that are
+   followed by strcpy/sprintf have been replaced with a less error
+   prone constructs such as xstrfmt.
+
+ * The internal stripspace() function has been moved to where it
+   logically belongs to, i.e. strbuf API, and the command line parser
+   of "git stripspace" has been updated to use the parse_options API.
+
+ * "git am" used to spawn "git mailinfo" via run_command() API once
+   per each patch, but learned to make a direct call to mailinfo()
+   instead.
+
+ * The implementation of "git mailinfo" was refactored so that a
+   mailinfo() function can be directly called from inside a process.
+
+ * With a "debug" helper, debugging of a single "git" invocation in
+   our test scripts has become a lot easier.
+
+ * The "configure" script did not test for -lpthread correctly, which
+   upset some linkers.
+
+ * Cross completed task off of subtree project's todo list.
+
+ * Test cleanups for the subtree project.
+
+ * Clean up style in an ancient test t9300.
+
+ * Work around some test flakiness with p4d.
+
+ * Fsck did not correctly detect a NUL-truncated header in a tag.
+
+ * Use a safer behavior when we hit errors verifying remote certificates.
+
+ * Speed up filter-branch for cases where we only care about rewriting
+   commits, not tree data.
+
+ * The parse-options API has been updated to make "-h" command line
+   option work more consistently in all commands.
+
+ * "git svn rebase/mkdirs" got optimized by keeping track of empty
+   directories better.
+
+ * Fix some racy client/server tests by treating SIGPIPE the same as a
+   normal non-zero exit.
+
+ * The necessary infrastructure to build topics using the free Travis
+   CI has been added. Developers forking from this topic (and enabling
+   Travis) can do their own builds, and we can turn on auto-builds for
+   git/git (including build-status for pull requests that people
+   open).
+
+ * The write(2) emulation for Windows learned to set errno to EPIPE
+   when necessary.
+
+
+Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.
+
+
+Fixes since v2.6
+----------------
+
+Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v2.6 in the maintenance
+track are contained in this release (see the maintenance releases'
+notes for details).
+
+ * Very small number of options take a parameter that is optional
+   (which is not a great UI element as they can only appear at the end
+   of the command line).  Add notice to documentation of each and
+   every one of them.
+
+ * "git blame --first-parent v1.0..v2.0" was not rejected but did not
+   limit the blame to commits on the first parent chain.
+
+ * "git subtree" (in contrib/) now can take whitespaces in the
+   pathnames, not only in the in-tree pathname but the name of the
+   directory that the repository is in.
+
+ * The ssh transport, just like any other transport over the network,
+   did not clear GIT_* environment variables, but it is possible to
+   use SendEnv and AcceptEnv to leak them to the remote invocation of
+   Git, which is not a good idea at all.  Explicitly clear them just
+   like we do for the local transport.
+
+ * Correct "git p4 --detect-labels" so that it does not fail to create
+   a tag that points at a commit that is also being imported.
+
+ * The Makefile always runs the library archiver with hardcoded "crs"
+   options, which was inconvenient for exotic platforms on which
+   people want to use programs with totally different set of command
+   line options.
+
+ * Customization to change the behaviour with "make -w" and "make -s"
+   in our Makefile was broken when they were used together.
+
+ * Allocation related functions and stdio are unsafe things to call
+   inside a signal handler, and indeed killing the pager can cause
+   glibc to deadlock waiting on allocation mutex as our signal handler
+   tries to free() some data structures in wait_for_pager().  Reduce
+   these unsafe calls.
+
+ * The way how --ref/--notes to specify the notes tree reference are
+   DWIMmed was not clearly documented.
+
+ * "git gc" used to barf when a symbolic ref has gone dangling
+   (e.g. the branch that used to be your upstream's default when you
+   cloned from it is now gone, and you did "fetch --prune").
+
+ * "git clone --dissociate" runs a big "git repack" process at the
+   end, and it helps to close file descriptors that are open on the
+   packs and their idx files before doing so on filesystems that
+   cannot remove a file that is still open.
+
+ * Description of the "log.follow" configuration variable in "git log"
+   documentation is now also copied to "git config" documentation.
+
+ * "git rebase -i" had a minor regression recently, which stopped
+   considering a line that begins with an indented '#' in its insn
+   sheet not a comment. Further, the code was still too picky on
+   Windows where CRLF left by the editor is turned into a trailing CR
+   on the line read via the "read" built-in command of bash.  Both of
+   these issues are now fixed.
+
+ * After "git checkout --detach", "git status" reported a fairly
+   useless "HEAD detached at HEAD", instead of saying at which exact
+   commit.
+
+ * When "git send-email" wanted to talk over Net::SMTP::SSL,
+   Net::Cmd::datasend() did not like to be fed too many bytes at the
+   same time and failed to send messages.  Send the payload one line
+   at a time to work around the problem.
+
+ * When "git am" was rewritten as a built-in, it stopped paying
+   attention to user.signingkey, which was fixed.
+
+ * It was not possible to use a repository-lookalike created by "git
+   worktree add" as a local source of "git clone".
+
+ * On a case insensitive filesystems, setting GIT_WORK_TREE variable
+   using a random cases that does not agree with what the filesystem
+   thinks confused Git that it wasn't inside the working tree.
+
+ * Performance-measurement tests did not work without an installed Git.
+
+ * A test script for the HTTP service had a timing dependent bug,
+   which was fixed.
+
+ * There were some classes of errors that "git fsck" diagnosed to its
+   standard error that did not cause it to exit with non-zero status.
+
+ * Work around "git p4" failing when the P4 depot records the contents
+   in UTF-16 without UTF-16 BOM.
+
+ * When "git gc --auto" is backgrounded, its diagnosis message is
+   lost.  Save it to a file in $GIT_DIR and show it next time the "gc
+   --auto" is run.
+
+ * The submodule code has been taught to work better with separate
+   work trees created via "git worktree add".
+
+ * "git gc" is safe to run anytime only because it has the built-in
+   grace period to protect young objects.  In order to run with no
+   grace period, the user must make sure that the repository is
+   quiescent.
+
+ * A recent "filter-branch --msg-filter" broke skipping of the commit
+   object header, which is fixed.
+
+ * The normalize_ceiling_entry() function does not muck with the end
+   of the path it accepts, and the real world callers do rely on that,
+   but a test insisted that the function drops a trailing slash.
+
+ * A test for interaction between untracked cache and sparse checkout
+   added in Git 2.5 days were flaky.
+
+ * A couple of commands still showed "[options]" in their usage string
+   to note where options should come on their command line, but we
+   spell that "[<options>]" in most places these days.
+
+ * The synopsis text and the usage string of subcommands that read
+   list of things from the standard input are often shown as if they
+   only take input from a file on a filesystem, which was misleading.
+
+ * "git am -3" had a small regression where it is aborted in its error
+   handling codepath when underlying merge-recursive failed in certain
+   ways, as it assumed that the internal call to merge-recursive will
+   never die, which is not the case (yet).
+
+ * The linkage order of libraries was wrong in places around libcurl.
+
+ * The name-hash subsystem that is used to cope with case insensitive
+   filesystems keeps track of directories and their on-filesystem
+   cases for all the paths in the index by holding a pointer to a
+   randomly chosen cache entry that is inside the directory (for its
+   ce->ce_name component).  This pointer was not updated even when the
+   cache entry was removed from the index, leading to use after free.
+   This was fixed by recording the path for each directory instead of
+   borrowing cache entries and restructuring the API somewhat.
+
+ * "git merge-file" tried to signal how many conflicts it found, which
+   obviously would not work well when there are too many of them.
+
+ * The error message from "git blame --contents --reverse" incorrectly
+   talked about "--contents --children".
+
+ * "git imap-send" did not compile well with older version of cURL library.
+
+ * Merging a branch that removes a path and another that changes the
+   mode bits on the same path should have conflicted at the path, but
+   it didn't and silently favoured the removal.
+
+ * "git --literal-pathspecs add -u/-A" without any command line
+   argument misbehaved ever since Git 2.0.
+
+ * "git daemon" uses "run_command()" without "finish_command()", so it
+   needs to release resources itself, which it forgot to do.
+
+ * "git status --branch --short" accessed beyond the constant string
+   "HEAD", which has been corrected.
+
+ * We peek objects from submodule's object store by linking it to the
+   list of alternate object databases, but the code to do so forgot to
+   correctly initialize the list.
+
+ * The code to prepare the working tree side of temporary directory
+   for the "dir-diff" feature forgot that symbolic links need not be
+   copied (or symlinked) to the temporary area, as the code already
+   special cases and overwrites them.  Besides, it was wrong to try
+   computing the object name of the target of symbolic link, which may
+   not even exist or may be a directory.
+
+ * A Range: request can be responded with a full response and when
+   asked properly libcurl knows how to strip the result down to the
+   requested range.  However, we were hand-crafting a range request
+   and it did not kick in.
+
+ * Having a leftover .idx file without corresponding .pack file in
+   the repository hurts performance; "git gc" learned to prune them.
+
+ * Apple's common crypto implementation of SHA1_Update() does not take
+   more than 4GB at a time, and we now have a compile-time workaround
+   for it.
+
+ * Produce correct "dirty" marker for shell prompts, even when we
+   are on an orphan or an unborn branch.
+
+ * A build without NO_IPv6 used to use gethostbyname() when guessing
+   user's hostname, instead of getaddrinfo() that is used in other
+   codepaths in such a build.
+
+ * The exit code of git-fsck did not reflect some types of errors
+   found in packed objects, which has been corrected.
+
+ * The helper used to iterate over loose object directories to prune
+   stale objects did not closedir() immediately when it is done with a
+   directory--a callback such as the one used for "git prune" may want
+   to do rmdir(), but it would fail on open directory on platforms
+   such as WinXP.
+
+ * "git p4" used to import Perforce CLs that touch only paths outside
+   the client spec as empty commits.  It has been corrected to ignore
+   them instead, with a new configuration git-p4.keepEmptyCommits as a
+   backward compatibility knob.
+
+ * The completion script (in contrib/) used to list "git column"
+   (which is not an end-user facing command) as one of the choices
+   (merge 160fcdb sg/completion-no-column later to maint).
+
+ * The error reporting from "git send-email", when SMTP TLS fails, has
+   been improved.
+   (merge 9d60524 jk/send-email-ssl-errors later to maint).
+
+ * When getpwuid() on the system returned NULL (e.g. the user is not
+   in the /etc/passwd file or other uid-to-name mappings), the
+   codepath to find who the user is to record it in the reflog barfed
+   and died.  Loosen the check in this codepath, which already accepts
+   questionable ident string (e.g. host part of the e-mail address is
+   obviously bogus), and in general when we operate fmt_ident() function
+   in non-strict mode.
+   (merge 92bcbb9 jk/ident-loosen-getpwuid later to maint).
+
+ * "git symbolic-ref" forgot to report a failure with its exit status.
+   (merge f91b273 jk/symbolic-ref-maint later to maint).
+
+ * History traversal with "git log --source" that starts with an
+   annotated tag failed to report the tag as "source", due to an
+   old regression in the command line parser back in v2.2 days.
+   (merge 728350b jk/pending-keep-tag-name later to maint).
+
+ * "git p4" when interacting with multiple depots at the same time
+   used to incorrectly drop changes.
+
+ * Code clean-up, minor fixes etc.