Git 2.28 Release Notes
======================

Updates since v2.27
-------------------

Backward compatibility notes

 * "feature.experimental" configuration variable is to let volunteers
   easily opt into a set of newer features, which use of the v2
   transport protocol is now a part of.


UI, Workflows & Features

 * The commands in the "diff" family learned to honor "diff.relative"
   configuration variable.

 * The check in "git fsck" to ensure that the tree objects are sorted
   still had corner cases it missed unsorted entries.

 * The interface to redact sensitive information in the trace output
   has been simplified.


Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.

 * Code optimization for a common case.
   (merge 8777616e4d an/merge-single-strategy-optim later to maint).

 * We've adopted a convention that any on-stack structure can be
   initialized to have zero values in all fields with "= { 0 }",
   even when the first field happens to be a pointer, but sparse
   complained that a null pointer should be spelled NULL for a long
   time.  Start using -Wno-universal-initializer option to squelch
   it (the latest sparse has it on by default).

 * "git log -L..." now takes advantage of the "which paths are touched
   by this commit?" info stored in the commit-graph system.

 * As FreeBSD is not the only platform whose regexp library reports
   a REG_ILLSEQ error when fed invalid UTF-8, add logic to detect that
   automatically and skip the affected tests.

 * "git bugreport" learns to report what shell is in use.

 * Support for GIT_CURL_VERBOSE has been rewritten in terms of
   GIT_TRACE_CURL.

 * Preliminary clean-ups around refs API, plus file format
   specification documentation for the reftable backend.

 * Workaround breakage in MSVC build, where "curl-config --cflags"
   gives settings appropriate for GCC build.


Fixes since v2.27
-----------------

 * The "--prepare-p4-only" option of "git p4" is supposed to stop
   after replaying one changeset, but kept going (by mistake?)

 * The error message from "git checkout -b foo -t bar baz" was
   confusing.

 * Some repositories in the wild have commits that record nonsense
   committer timezone (e.g. rails.git); "git fast-import" learned an
   option to pass these nonsense timestamps intact to allow recreating
   existing repositories as-is.
   (merge d42a2fb72f en/fast-import-looser-date later to maint).

 * The command line completion script (in contrib/) tried to complete
   "git stash -p" as if it were "git stash push -p", but it was too
   aggressive and also affected "git stash show -p", which has been
   corrected.
   (merge fffd0cf520 vs/complete-stash-show-p-fix later to maint).

 * On-the-wire protocol v2 easily falls into a deadlock between the
   remote-curl helper and the fetch-pack process when the server side
   prematurely throws an error and disconnects.  The communication has
   been updated to make it more robust.

 * "git checkout -p" did not handle a newly added path at all.
   (merge 2c8bd8471a js/checkout-p-new-file later to maint).

 * The code to parse "git bisect start" command line was lax in
   validating the arguments.
   (merge 4d9005ff5d cb/bisect-helper-parser-fix later to maint).

 * Reduce memory usage during "diff --quiet" in a worktree with too
   many stat-unmatched paths.
   (merge d2d7fbe129 jk/diff-memuse-optim-with-stat-unmatch later to maint).

 * The reflog entries for "git clone" and "git fetch" did not
   anonymize the URL they operated on.
   (merge 46da295a77 js/reflog-anonymize-for-clone-and-fetch later to maint).

 * The behaviour of "sparse-checkout" in the state "git clone
   --no-checkout" left was changed accidentally in 2.27, which has
   been corrected.

 * Use of negative pathspec, while collecting paths including
   untracked ones in the working tree, was broken.

 * The same worktree directory must be registered only once, but
   "git worktree move" allowed this invariant to be violated, which
   has been corrected.
   (merge 810382ed37 es/worktree-duplicate-paths later to maint).

 * The effect of sparse checkout settings on submodules is documented.
   (merge e7d7c73249 en/sparse-with-submodule-doc later to maint).

 * Other code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc.
   (merge 2c31a7aa44 jx/pkt-line-doc-count-fix later to maint).
   (merge d63ae31962 cb/t5608-cleanup later to maint).
   (merge 788db145c7 dl/t-readme-spell-git-correctly later to maint).
   (merge 45a87a83bb dl/python-2.7-is-the-floor-version later to maint).
   (merge b75a219904 es/advertise-contribution-doc later to maint).