Git v2.56 Release Notes
=======================

UI, Workflows & Features
------------------------

 * Advice shown by "git status" when the local branch is behind or has
   diverged from its push branch has been updated to suggest "git pull
   <remote> <branch>".

 * The handling of promisor-remote protocol capability has been updated
   to allow the other side to add to the list of promisor remotes via the
   'promisor.acceptFromServerURL' configuration variable.

 * The 'ort' merge backend has been hardened against corrupt trees by
   ensuring it aborts under appropriate error conditions.

 * The `fetch.followRemoteHEAD` configuration variable has been added to
   provide a default for the per-remote `remote.<name>.followRemoteHEAD`
   setting.

 * "git log --follow" has been updated to better handle non-linear
   history, in which the path being tracked gets renamed differently in
   multiple history lines.

 * The "git repo info" command has been taught new keys to output both
   absolute and relative paths for "gitdir" and "commondir", supported by
   a new path-formatting helper extracted from "git rev-parse".

 * When 'git push origin/main' or 'git branch origin main' is run, the
   command is now recognized as a potential typo, and advice has been
   added to offer a typo fix.

 * The 'git refs' toolbox has been extended with new 'create', 'delete',
   'update', and 'rename' subcommands to create, delete, update, and
   rename references, respectively.

 * The experimental 'git history' command has been taught a new 'drop'
   subcommand to remove a commit, with its descendants replayed onto its
   parent.

 * The alignment of commit object name abbreviations in 'git blame'
   output has been optimized to reserve a column for marks (caret,
   question mark, or asterisk) only when such marks are actually shown.

 * Option parsing with 'git rev-parse --parseopt' and in most 'git'
   subcommands has been updated to exit with 0 (instead of 129) when the
   help option ('-h' or '--help') is requested directly by the user,
   aligning with standard Unix convention.

 * The '[includeIf "condition"]' conditional inclusion facility for
   configuration files has been taught to use the location of the
   worktree in its condition.

 * The usage string and SYNOPSIS for 'git fast-export' have been
   standardized to make them consistent with each other and with other
   commands.

 * 'git log --graph' has been modified to visually distinguish parentless
   'root' commits (and commits that become roots due to history
   simplification) by indenting them, preventing them from appearing
   falsely related to unrelated commits rendered immediately above them.

 * Userdiff patterns for Swift have been added, with support for
   Swift-specific constructs such as attributes, modifiers, failable
   initializers, and generics.

 * Configuration file locking has been updated to retry for a short
   period, avoiding failures when multiple processes attempt to update
   the configuration simultaneously.

 * The 'remote-object-info' command has been added to 'git cat-file
   --batch-command', allowing clients to request object metadata
   (currently size) from a remote server via protocol v2 without
   downloading the entire object.  Format placeholders are dynamically
   filtered on the client based on server-advertised capabilities,
   returning empty strings for inapplicable or unsupported fields.

 * 'git branch -d' has been taught to report when a branch cannot be
   deleted because it is being used in an active bisect run.

 * 'git mv' has been updated to check for a missing destination
   leading directory during the checking phase, allowing 'git mv -n'
   to report the failure.  The error message when the rename(2)
   syscall fails has also been improved to name both the source and
   the destination.

 * 'git add' has been taught a new '--resolved' option to stage
   conflict-resolved paths, while leaving unrelated local changes
   unstaged.  It scans the unmerged paths for leftover conflict
   markers and aborts if any are found.

 * The known limitations of the ref format migration in 'git refs' have
   been moved to be displayed as a warning admonition directly under the
   description of the 'migrate' subcommand, improving visibility.  A
   reference to 'git-maintenance' has also been corrected to use the
   'linkgit' macro.

 * The 'git bisect' command has been taught a
   '--reset-when-found[=<where>]' option that tells the command to
   automatically run 'git bisect reset' to jump back to the original
   state or to the found culprit.

 * The 'git branch' command has been taught the '--delete-merged' option
   to remove local branches that are already merged into their tracked
   remote-tracking branches.

 * The 'remote-object-info' command for 'git cat-file --batch-command'
   has been extended to support the '%(objecttype)' placeholder.

 * The usage string of 'git fast-import' has been updated to use the
   parse_options() API for displaying help, and its SYNOPSIS in the
   documentation has been standardized to match.

 * The error message given by 'git send-email' when a message file is
   missing a 'Subject:' header has been clarified, and the error string
   is now terminated with a newline so that Perl avoids appending its
   internal source location data.

 * The '--shallow-file' option of 'git' command requires a value, but the
   code did not check the presence of a value and instead segfaulted
   without one, which has been corrected.

 * 'git repack' has been taught '--drop-filtered' to delete local
   promisor blobs exceeding a limit (currently 'blob:limit=') in partial
   clones, reclaiming space.  Guards prevent running during other
   operations or if referenced by the index.

 * The documentation for 'git format-rev' has been updated to use the
   [synopsis] block definition on code blocks to properly highlight
   placeholders, and a quoting inconsistency in the running text has
   been fixed.

 * The DWIM logic in 'git worktree add' sometimes tried to infer a
   remote-tracking branch when an explicit '-b' or '-B' option was
   given to create a new branch, causing the explicit branch name to
   be ignored, which has been corrected.

 * The command line completion (in contrib/) has been taught to handle
   the experimental 'git history' command.

 * 'git checkout' and 'git worktree add' makes guesses based on a name
   of a remote-tracking branch, but does not give an error when such a
   remote-tracking branch cannot be uniquely identified, which has
   been corrected.

 * The 'git replay' command has been taught the '--linearize' option to
   drop merge commits and linearize the replayed history, mimicking 'git
   rebase --no-rebase-merges'.

 * The documentation for 'git cherry-pick' has been updated to clarify
   that the '--no-commit' option intentionally skips setting the
   'CHERRY_PICK_HEAD' ref.  A test has also been added to ensure this
   behavior holds even when the operation stops for conflicts.

 * The 'git imap-send' command has been taught to take the '--draft'
   option to mark uploaded messages as drafts, which helps some email
   clients render them properly for editing and sending.

 * The git rev-list command has been augmented with a '--missing-only'
   option that filters the output to only show missing objects,
   stripping the leading '?' character and suppressing present objects,
   which is useful when used in combination with '--missing=print' or
   '--missing=print-info'.


Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.
--------------------------------------------------------------

 * The refactoring of 'setup.c' has been continued to drop remaining
   global state (`git_work_tree_cfg`, `is_bare_repository_cfg`), updating
   `is_bare_repository()` to no longer implicitly rely on
   `the_repository`.

 * Project-specific configuration for b4 has been introduced, and the
   documentation has been updated to recommend using it as a
   streamlined method for submitting patches.

 * The default format path of git cat-file --batch has been optimized
   to use strbuf_add_oid_hex() and strbuf_add_uint() instead of
   strbuf_addf(), yielding a noticeable speedup.

 * Commands that list branches and tags (like git branch and git tag)
   have been optimized to pass the namespace prefix when initializing
   their ref iterator, avoiding a loose-ref scaling regression in
   repositories with many unrelated loose references.

 * The packed object source has been refactored into a proper struct
   odb_source.

 * The global configuration variables protect_hfs and protect_ntfs have
   been migrated into struct repo_config_values to tie them to
   per-repository configuration state.

 * The trailer sections in SubmittingPatches have been updated to
   encourage use of standard trailers.

 * The documentation in SubmittingPatches has been updated to clarify how
   patch contributors should respond to design and viability critiques,
   and how the resolution of such critiques should be recorded in the
   final commit messages.

 * The pack-objects command has been updated to support reachability
   bitmaps and delta-islands concurrently with the `--path-walk` option,
   allowing faster packaging by falling back to path-walk when bitmaps
   cannot fully satisfy the request.

 * Documentation on community contribution guidelines has been updated to
   encourage replying to review comments before rerolling, and to advise
   a default limit of at most one reroll per day to give reviewers across
   different time zones enough time to participate.

 * The lazy priority queue optimization pattern (deferring actual removal
   in 'prio_queue_get()' to allow get+put fusion) has been folded
   directly into 'prio_queue' itself, speeding up commit traversal
   workflows and simplifying callers.

 * The 'reprepare()' callback for object database sources has been
   generalized into a 'prepare()' callback with an optional flush cache
   flag, and a new 'odb_prepare()' wrapper has been introduced to allow
   pre-opening object database sources.

 * The 'whence' field in 'struct object_info' has been removed.  The
   backend-specific object information retrieval has been refactored into
   an opt-in 'struct object_info_source' structure.

 * A racy build failure under Meson has been corrected by ensuring that
   the generated header file 'hook-list.h' is built before compiling
   files in 'builtin_sources' that depend on it.

 * The repository discovery and repository configuration phases, which
   were previously intertwined in 'setup.c', have been split.  Repository
   discovery has been updated to populate a 'struct repo_discovery'
   without modifying the repository state, which is then taken by
   repository configuration to initialize the repository, paving the way
   for clean unification of repository configuration.

 * The 'SubmittingPatches' document has been updated to explicitly
   describe the expectation for contributors to retract or abandon their
   patch series when they are no longer pursuing it.

 * The contributor guide has been updated to advise new contributors to
   trim irrelevant quoted text when replying to review comments, matching
   the existing advice given to reviewers.

 * The build system has been updated to support building universal macOS
   binaries when 'Rust' is enabled, by compiling separate static archives
   for each target triple listed in 'RUST_TARGETS' and combining them
   using the macOS 'lipo' tool.  The 'git-credential-osxkeychain' helper
   has been updated to link against '$(RUST_LIB)' when 'Rust' is enabled.

 * The test suite has been updated to use the 'test_grep' helper instead
   of bare 'grep' for test assertions, allowing file contents to be
   printed on failure for easier debugging.  A new 'greplint' linter has
   been introduced to detect and prevent new bare 'grep' assertions from
   being added to the test suite.

 * The pipelines in 't1410-reflog.sh' have been replaced with the
   'test_stdout_line_count' helper to avoid suppressing the exit code of
   'git' commands, ensuring failures are not hidden from the test suite.

 * The cache-scanning loop in 'next_cache_entry()' has been optimized
   to avoid rescanning already-unpacked index entries, preventing a
   quadratic performance slow-down when diffing the working tree
   against a commit with a pathspec matching early index entries.

 * The global configuration variable 'ignore_case' (representing the
   'core.ignorecase' configuration) has been migrated into 'struct
   repo_config_values' to tie it to a specific repository instance.

 * The performance of ref updates and reads using the 'reftable' backend
   in the presence of many deletion tombstone records has been optimized
   by removing the tombstone suppression flag from the merged iterator
   and instead skipping tombstones at higher-level call sites where
   iteration bounds are known.

 * Various code paths have been hardened against potential NULL-pointer
   dereferences and invalid file descriptor accesses flagged by
   Coverity.

 * The in-tree 'b4' cover letter template has been updated to include the
   'change-id' trailer, ensuring that sent tags generated by 'b4' contain
   the required tracking information for subsequent runs.

 * 'git receive-pack' has been refactored to use ODB transaction
   interfaces instead of directly managing 'tmp_objdir' for staging
   incoming objects, bringing it closer to being ODB backend agnostic.

 * The test script 't/t9811-git-p4-label-import.sh' has been
   modernized to use 'test_path_is_file' and 'test_path_is_missing'
   instead of raw 'test -f' and '! test -f' calls.

 * A redundant strbuf_reset() call in the 'HAVE_GETDELIM' path of
   strbuf_getwholeline() has been removed, as getdelim() overwrites the
   buffer and the length is updated afterward.

 * The object database enumeration interface odb_for_each_object() has
   been taught to accept object filters, allowing the underlying backends
   to optimize the traversal by using reachability bitmaps when
   available.  'git cat-file --batch-all-objects' has been updated to use
   this generic interface, simplifying its code and avoiding direct
   access to ODB backend internals.

 * The test script 't/t1100-commit-tree-options.sh' has been modernized
   by converting test cases to the modern style (using single quotes and
   tab indentation) and moving the creation of the expected file inside
   the setup test so it runs under the protection of the test harness.

 * The test script 't/t7614-merge-signoff.sh' has been updated to avoid
   suppressing the exit code of 'git' commands in a pipe.

 * The 'git rev-list --no-walk' command has been corrected to restore
   pathspec filtering, which was lost when the streaming walk was
   refactored.

 * The ref subsystem and the worktree API have been refactored to pass a
   repository pointer down the call chain, allowing them to drop
   references to the global 'the_repository' variable.  As part of this,
   the handling of the 'core.packedRefsTimeout' configuration has been
   moved into the per-repository ref store structure.

 * 'git branch --contains' and 'git for-each-ref --contains' have been
   optimized to use the memoized commit traversal previously used only by
   'git tag --contains', significantly speeding up connectivity checks
   across many candidate refs with shared history.

 * The passing of push destination specifications in the 'remote-curl'
   helper has been simplified by removing the explicit 'count' parameter
   and relying on the NULL-termination of the array.

 * The dependency on the global 'the_repository' variable in the
   'refspec.c' API has been removed by passing the hash algorithm
   explicitly to refspec-parsing functions and storing it in 'struct
   refspec'.

 * The enumeration of untracked and ignored files in 'git status' has
   been optimized by avoiding quadratic complexity when inserting into
   string lists, reducing the construction cost from O(n^2) to O(n log
   n).

 * The copy_file() and copy_file_with_time() functions have been
   refactored to take a repository parameter, allowing the removal of the
   implicit dependency on the global 'the_repository' variable in
   'copy.c'.

 * The tempfile and lockfile APIs have been refactored to stop depending
   on the 'the_repository' global variable, and their callers have been
   updated to use the repository-aware variants.

 * The 'trust_executable_bit' (coming from the 'core.filemode'
   configuration) has been migrated into 'struct repo_config_values' to
   tie it to a specific repository instance.

 * The 'excludes_file' and various other global configuration variables
   (including 'editor_program', 'pager_program', 'askpass_program', and
   'push_default') have been migrated into the per-repository structure.

 * The 'git stash push' command has been optimized to avoid unnecessary
   sparse index expansion when pathspecs are wholly inside the
   sparse-checkout cone.  Also, a potential out-of-bounds read in the
   sparse-index expansion check helper pathspec_needs_expanded_index()
   has been fixed by consistently using the parsed, prefixed path.

 * The logic to write loose objects has been refactored and moved from
   'object-file.c' to the loose backend source file 'odb/source-loose.c',
   making the loose backend more self-contained.  This is achieved by
   first refactoring force_object_loose() to use generic ODB write
   interfaces instead of loose-backend internals.

 * Object database housekeeping in 'git gc' and 'git maintenance' has
   been refactored to be pluggable.  The files-backend-specific logic,
   including incremental and geometric repacking as well as object
   pruning, has been moved out of the command implementation and into the
   files object database source, enabling future alternative object
   database backends to implement their own housekeeping services.

 * The image version used by the static-analysis CI job has been bumped
   to ubuntu-latest (Ubuntu 24.04), which brings in a newer Coccinelle
   version that resolves a severe performance regression.  A false
   positive warning from the 'CHECK_ASSERTION_SIDE_EFFECTS' build with
   GCC 15 in the Bloom filter code has also been silenced to facilitate
   the image upgrade.

 * The alias tests in 't/t0014-alias.sh' have been updated to dynamically
   query the list of deprecated commands using 'git
   --list-cmds=deprecated' to avoid test failures when running with
   'WITH_BREAKING_CHANGES' in a build directory that contains stale
   executables of formerly deprecated commands.

 * The code path that deals with relative paths in the diff-lib has
   been cleaned up.

 * The get_commit_action() function has been refactored to be a pure
   predicate by moving the side-effecting line-level log range folding to
   simplify_commit().  This ensures that evaluating a commit's action
   before the walk reaches it does not prematurely mutate its tracked
   line ranges, making it safer for potential lookahead evaluations.

 * Synopsis and options in the documentation for 'git format-patch',
   'git imap-send', 'git send-email', and 'git request-pull' have been
   updated to the modern style.

 * A new test helper commit_body() has been introduced to print the
   message body of a commit, and various tests have been updated to use
   it instead of spelling out the command pipeline manually and losing
   the exit status of the 'git cat-file' command on the upstream of the
   pipe.

 * Tests for 'git merge-base --is-ancestor' have been added to cover
   exit codes (0 for success, 1 for non-ancestor, 128 for errors) and
   to ensure it cannot be combined with '--all'.

 * The 'TRACE2_ANCESTRY' prerequisite in the 't0213' test script has been
   refined to avoid failures under user-mode emulation by verifying that
   the ancestry collector reports the expected process names rather than
   the emulator binary name.

 * Concurrent downloads of packfiles via packfile URIs and dumb HTTP are
   safer by avoiding concurrent appends to the staging file.  Opening in
   read-write mode with separate file offsets prevents corruption and
   preserves resumability.  'fetch-pack' now tolerates pre-existing
   '.keep' files.

 * The 'ssh-agent' tests in 't7528' have been fixed to work when the
   user's login shell is csh-like, by explicitly passing '-s' to
   'ssh-agent' to force Bourne shell syntax.

 * A compatibility wrapper for writev(3p) has been reintroduced,
   including fixes for CMake build and 'MAX_IO_SIZE' limits on NonStop.
   Calls to write(3p) in send_sideband() and cat_blob() have been
   refactored to use writev(3p) wrappers to reduce syscall overhead.

 * The creation of the on-disk data structures for the object database
   has been made pluggable, allowing future backends to customize their
   setup.  As part of this, the initialization of the object database
   has been deferred, and the loading of the loose-object map has been
   detangled from repository initialization.

 * The 'struct odb_read_stream' and 'struct odb_write_stream'
   structures have been consolidated into a single unified 'struct
   odb_stream' structure, simplifying object database streaming APIs
   and enabling streaming of arbitrary object types.

 * The sequencer has been updated to release the object database before
   spawning 'git commit'.  This prevents open file handles from
   blocking auto-maintenance tasks, such as repacking, on systems like
   Windows where open files cannot be easily unlinked.

 * The merge-base computation has been optimized by stopping the walk
   early when one side's exclusive commits in the queue are exhausted,
   yielding significant speedups for queries with one-sided histories.

 * A handful of code paths have been corrected to check return values
   from functions like curl_easy_duphandle(), deflateInit(), lseek(),
   dup(), and strbuf_getline_lf(), resolving several Coverity warnings
   about unchecked returns.

 * The setting of a now-unused member '.pretty_given' in the sequencer
   machinery has been removed.

 * The performance of adding numerous new packfiles has been improved
   by introducing a fast path for known-new packfiles to skip an
   unnecessary traversal in packfile_list_append(), avoiding a
   quadratic complexity regression on load.

 * The unused name parameter in 'struct chdir_notify_entry' has been
   removed from chdir_notify_register(), chdir_notify_unregister(), and
   related callback signatures across several subsystems, simplifying the
   API now that trace output no longer uses it.

 * A heap-use-after-free bug in the object name parsing code when
   reporting failures with a relative path to a sparse directory has
   been corrected.

 * The object database (odb) API has been refactored to distinguish
   between missing objects and corrupt ones by returning more
   descriptive error statuses.  Both the packed and loose backends now
   faithfully propagate error details using a generic strbuf error
   mechanism, removing backend-specific leakage from central lookup
   paths.

 * The object database layer has been simplified by eagerly loading
   alternate object directories upon initialization, instead of
   deferring it to the first object lookup.  This eliminates the need
   for scattered lazy-loading calls throughout the codebase and paves
   the way for integrating alternates with the pluggable backends.

 * The threshold for geometric repacking to trigger based on loose
   object count has been adjusted to match that of 'git gc --auto',
   preventing over-aggressive repacking during concurrent writes.

 * The 'git receive-pack' command has been updated to use a new ODB
   transaction interface for writing incoming packfiles, making it more
   backend-agnostic.

 * The mechanism to generate a packfile corresponding to the result of
   a fetch/push has been made pluggable through a set of object
   database callback functions, removing hardcoded references to
   'pack-objects' and enabling alternative ODBs to serve packfiles
   themselves.

 * The pack-objects command has been updated to record the total bytes
   written to pack files in trace2 output, allowing performance
   analysis of different compression settings by comparing the
   resulting pack sizes.

 * The global variable 'fetch_if_missing' has been moved to a member in
   'struct repository', continuing the libification process and
   allowing per-repository control (such as for submodules).

 * The reftable code has been optimized to avoid an unnecessary
   stat/reload of the stack when an addition already holds the
   list_file lock, reducing the number of newfstatat syscalls from
   linear to constant when writing refs.

 * The application of the edited patch in 'git add -e' has been
   refactored to use the internal apply API directly, avoiding the need
   to spawn a 'git apply' subprocess.

 * The memory ownership of argv elements passed to the revision
   machinery has been made more robust by keeping logically "freed"
   elements alive until the rev_info struct is released, preventing
   use-after-free bugs when options store references to them.

 * The object lookup machinery has been taught to gracefully recover
   when a multi-pack-index points to an owning pack that was removed
   during a concurrent geometric repack, and 'git replay' has been
   fixed to not segfault when reading such missing objects.

 * A collection of patches from Git for Windows has been upstreamed,
   mostly focusing on simplifying and robustifying build configurations
   for MinGW/MSYS2, dropping obsolete compatibility options, and allowing
   the main 'git.exe' to be used directly without the extra wrapper
   process on Windows.

 * The process of downloading packfile URIs in protocol v2 has been
   instrumented with a Trace2 region.  This visibility allows tracking
   the cumulative time spent downloading external packs and the number
   of advertised URIs without emitting a separate event per pack.

 * CGI helper scripts used by HTTP-related test scripts have been updated
   to use atomic filesystem operations, preventing race conditions when
   Apache handles concurrent requests.

 * "git maintenance" triggered "rerere gc" in unappropriate times and
   interfered with "git rebase" etc. too much.  The conditions "rerere
   gc" gets triggered have been tweaked.

 * Windows build switches from MINGW64 to URCR64 runtime starting Git
   2.56.0; switch the cmake based build at the same time.

 * The mechanism to register in-memory alternate object sources has
   been removed, as submodule object databases are now accessed
   natively via their own repository structures.  This simplifies
   object database management and prepares the codebase for migrating
   alternate tracking into the files backend.

 * The consistency checks for the object database (fsck) have been
   decoupled from the generic builtin implementation and moved into the
   backend-specific object source layers, making them pluggable for
   different object storage formats.

 * When cross-compiling with Cargo, the output artifact is placed in a
   target-specific subdirectory, which causes the build system to fail
   to locate it.  The build system has been updated to respect the
   'CARGO_BUILD_TARGET' environment variable.


Fixes since v2.55
-----------------

 * A regression in the error diagnosis code for invalid .git files has
   been fixed, avoiding a potential NULL-pointer crash when reporting
   that a .git file does not point to a valid repository.
   (merge 54a441bcea jk/setup-gitfile-diag-fix later to maint).

 * Support for hashing loose or packed objects larger than 4GB on Windows
   and other LLP64 platforms has been improved by converting object header
   buffers and data-handling functions from 'unsigned long' to 'size_t'.
   (merge d99e13d0be po/hash-object-size-t later to maint).

 * The display of the rebase todo list in "git status" has been
   improved to correctly abbreviate object IDs for more commands and
   avoid misinterpreting refs as object IDs.
   (merge 6f34e5f9e3 pw/status-rebase-todo later to maint).

 * Reference backend configuration has been updated to load lazily to
   avoid recursive calls during repository initialization when 'onbranch'
   configuration conditions are evaluated. This has also fixed a memory
   leak and allowed the unused `chdir_notify_reparent()` machinery to be
   dropped.
   (merge d6522d01df ps/refs-onbranch-fixes later to maint).

 * The connectivity check has been refactored to search for promisor
   objects in a generic way using the object database interface,
   rather than iterating packfiles directly. This allows connectivity
   checks to work properly in repositories that do not use packfiles.
   (merge 66ee9cb930 ps/connected-generic-promisor-checks later to maint).

 * A test checking interactions between git rebase --quit and
   autostash in t3420-rebase-autostash.sh has been corrected to use
   test_path_is_missing instead of ! grep on a file that shouldn't
   exist in the conflicted state.
   (merge eaad121fef sg/t3420-do-not-grep-in-missing-file later to maint).

 * The GPG and SSH signature parsing code has been corrected to strip
   carriage return characters only when they immediately precede line
   feeds, instead of unconditionally stripping all carriage returns.
   (merge 5dea8b690b ad/gpg-strip-cr-before-lf later to maint).

 * A memory leak in the 'reftable_writer_new()' initialization function
   has been fixed by delaying the allocation of 'struct reftable_writer'
   until after input options are validated.
   (merge c6fb3b9c3e jk/reftable-leakfix later to maint).

 * A memory leak in the '--base' handling of 'git format-patch' has been
   plugged, and the leak reporting of the test suite when running under a
   TAP harness has been improved.
   (merge 973a0373ff jk/format-patch-leakfix later to maint).

 * A write file stream resource leak has been fixed as part of a code
   cleanup.
   (merge ebb4d2ffa3 jc/history-message-prep-fix later to maint).

 * Various memory leaks in the Bloom-filter code paths that are exposed
   when running tests with the 'GIT_TEST_COMMIT_GRAPH_CHANGED_PATHS=1'
   environment variable have been plugged.
   (merge 459088ec2e jk/bloom-leak-fixes later to maint).

 * The wincred credential helper has been updated to avoid memory
   corruption when erasing credentials and to prevent silent
   credential loss when storing OAuth tokens, by correcting buffer
   allocations and arguments passed to safe-CRT APIs.
   (merge f635ab9ab4 js/wincred-fixes later to maint).

 * Various code paths that initialize a cryptographic hash context but
   bail out or finish without calling 'git_hash_final()' have been taught
   to call 'git_hash_discard()' to release allocated resources, fixing
   memory leaks when Git is built with non-default backends like
   'OpenSSL' or 'libgcrypt'.
   (merge 600588d2aa jk/hash-algo-leak-fixes later to maint).

 * Various resource leaks, invalid file descriptor closures, and process
   handle ownership issues flagged by Coverity have been fixed.
   (merge 9184231173 js/coverity-fixes later to maint).

 * Dockerized CI jobs running in private GitHub repositories have been
   adjusted to use explicit process and file limits, preventing resource
   exhaustion errors on private runners.
   (merge bad766fbac js/ci-dockerized-pid-limit later to maint).

 * Various test scripts have been updated to clean up large temporary
   files and repositories, reducing peak disk usage during testing.
   Also, expensive tests have been disabled on platforms that lack
   sufficient resources (like 32-bit platforms and Windows CI runners),
   and the long test suite has been enabled in GitLab CI.
   (merge 84248444ad ps/t-fixes-for-git-test-long later to maint).

 * The UTF-8 precomposition wrapper on macOS has been updated to use a
   flexible array member to represent the name of a directory entry,
   preventing fortified libc checks from failing when the name is
   reallocated to be larger than 'NAME_MAX' bytes.
   (merge 1eb281159f ih/precompose-flex-array later to maint).

 * The 'git_hash_*()' wrappers have been updated to be used consistently
   across the codebase instead of direct calls to members of 'struct
   git_hash_algo', and 'git_hash_discard()' has been made idempotent to
   simplify cleanups.
   (merge 9e396aa553 jk/git-hash-cleanups later to maint).

 * The sideband demultiplexer has been updated to recognize ANSI SGR
   escape sequences that use colon-separated subfields (e.g., for
   256-color or true-color codes).
   (merge 3792b2aea4 mm/sideband-ansi-sgr-colon-fix later to maint).

 * The 'reftable' code has been hardened against corrupted tables by
   fixing out-of-bounds writes, out-of-bounds reads, and abort calls
   during parsing.
   (merge ca93c27328 ps/reftable-hardening later to maint).

 * A description in the release notes for Git 2.55.0 has been
   retroactively updated to clarify that Rust support is enabled by
   default, but still optional, and will become mandatory in Git 3.0.
   (merge 18b2009d14 jc/relnotes-2.55-rust-fix later to maint).

 * The early-exit optimization in 'paint_down_to_common()' has been
   gated on the queue being generation-ordered, fixing a bug where
   'git merge-base' (without '--all') could return incorrect results
   on repositories with v1 commit graphs and clock skew.
   (merge ae68032a8d kk/commit-reach-find-all-fix later to maint).

 * The client-side parser of the server-advertised bundle-URI list has
   been updated to drain the remaining response in order to avoid
   protocol desynchronization when the server sends a misconfigured list.
   Also, the server-side has been taught to omit empty configuration
   values instead of sending invalid key-value lines.
   (merge 50de1169e4 tc/bundle-uri-empty-fix later to maint).

 * The 'topo_levels' slab was propagated only to the topmost layer of a
   split commit-graph chain, causing topological levels for commits in
   base layers to be recomputed during incremental writes.  This has been
   corrected.

 * The stream-based object signature verification path has been
   corrected to avoid double-closing the stream on read errors.
   (merge cfd52a74a0 ps/odb-stream-double-close-fix later to maint).

 * The '-i' shorthand for the '--init' option, which was accepted by the
   'git submodule update' command until it was broken in a modernization
   of the option-parsing code, has been restored.
   (merge ff1da37f58 dm/submodule-update-i-shorthand later to maint).

 * An accidental use of the '%zu' format specifier in 'git
   submodule--helper' has been corrected to use 'PRIuMAX' and cast the
   value to 'uintmax_t' to avoid portability issues.
   (merge 3279c13c00 jc/submodule-helper-avoid-zu later to maint).

 * The rebase post-rewrite notes-copying logic has been corrected.  When
   a commit is dropped during rebase (e.g., because its changes are
   already upstream), it is no longer recorded as rewritten, preventing
   its notes from being copied to an unrelated commit.
   (merge 42554b78fd pw/rebase-drop-notes-with-commit later to maint).

 * A few memory problems in the Rust interface to C hash functions have
   been corrected.  The 'Clone' implementation of 'CryptoHasher' now
   properly initializes the context before cloning, and its 'Drop'
   implementation now discards the context to prevent leaks.

 * The object ID shortening and linking in the 'commitdiff' view of
   'gitweb' has been corrected to work even when the index line carries
   a trailing file mode.
   (merge fda513d6fe tl/gitweb-shorten-hashes-with-modes later to maint).

 * When the push remote is specified as a URL, the fetch refspec of a
   uniquely matching configured remote is now used to find and update
   the remote-tracking branch (e.g., '@{push}').

 * Traversals with '--exclude-first-parent-only' have been corrected
   to properly stop after the first parent even when it has already
   been marked as 'SEEN'.
   (merge 47382f7398 jc/exclude-first-parent-seen later to maint).

 * A segfault when 'git clone --revision' talks to a server that does not
   support protocol v2 (falling back to protocol v0) has been corrected.
   (merge 1034ad383f af/clone-revision-v0-segfault-fix later to maint).

 * rewrites_release() in 'remote.c' has been updated to free 'struct
   rewrite' instances, their '.instead_of' arrays, and their contents.
   (merge dcef3bf041 jc/remote-insteadof-leakfix later to maint).

 * The remote-matching logic for submodules has been corrected to resolve
   'url.*.insteadOf' aliases before comparing the inventoried URL from
   '.gitmodules' with the URLs of configured remotes.

 * 'git diff --relative' running with '--cached' has been corrected to
   avoid a segfault when encountering unmerged paths outside the
   prefix.
   (merge 447126ed7d jk/diff-relative-cached-unmerged later to maint).

 * Two bugs in how 'git rebase' handles skipped 'fixup' and 'squash'
   commands have been fixed.  One bug caused an incorrect commit count to
   be shown in the template message when multiple commands were skipped,
   and another prevented the editor from opening when the final command
   in a chain containing 'fixup -c' was skipped.

 * Git for Windows has been updated to avoid auto-detecting the symlink
   type if the target path starts with a slash, preventing NTLM
   credential leaks when checking out repositories with crafted
   symbolic links pointing to network shares.

 * 'git cat-file --batch-command' that asked for 'contents' without
   'type' segfaults, which has been corrected.
   (merge 2abc7f0304 jk/cat-file-batch-wo-type-fix later to maint).

 * A memory leak in 'git merge' when run without arguments (which
   triggers the default-to-upstream path) has been fixed.  A test has
   been added to cover this case.
   (merge 68cce04a02 tc/merge-default-to-upstream-leakfix later to maint).

 * A boundary case check in reachability bitmap traversal has been
   corrected to properly handle the object at position zero, which was
   previously skipped, leading to redundant bitmap loading.
   (merge b56b48301e dl/pack-bitmap-position-zero later to maint).

 * A crash in the 'sparse-index' collapse code when encountering an
   invalidated cache-tree node (due to an intent-to-add path) has been
   fixed by avoiding collapsing such subtrees.
   (merge eede1e69fe ds/sparse-index-ita-crash later to maint).

 * Documentation for 'git replay' has been updated to refer to its
   configuration variables.
   (merge 48c0549f5c kh/doc-replay-config later to maint).

 * Documentation for 'git interpret-trailers' has been updated to explain
   the format of trailer keys (alphanumeric characters and hyphens),
   replace outdated terminology, define key terms upfront, and document
   how comment lines in the input are treated.
   (merge 4515c86fd9 kh/doc-trailers later to maint).

 * The 'pack-objects' and delta-encoding code paths have been updated to
   use 'size_t' instead of 'unsigned long' for object sizes and offset
   limits, avoiding potential truncation issues on 64-bit Windows.
   (merge d50ac11724 js/pack-objects-delta-size-t later to maint).

 * A client requesting the promisor-remote capability without a value
   caused a null pointer dereference, which has been corrected by
   rejecting a request without an argument.
   (merge dd6b35ff71 en/serve-promisor-remote-fix later to maint).

 * Various tests in 't7900-maintenance.sh' have been updated to use a
   throwaway repository, and auto-detaching of maintenance tasks is now
   disabled for these tests to fix flaky races with concurrent background
   maintenance jobs.
   (merge 2775d8bcd1 ps/t7900-deflake-maintenance later to maint).

 * The help text for the '-l' option of 'git diff' has been updated.
   (merge 764243bdf4 en/diff-l-opt-help later to maint).

 * 'git -C <dir> diff fi<TAB>' did not complete 'file', which has
   been corrected.
   (merge 354d1bf3a0 jc/complete-diff-tracked-paths later to maint).

 * 'git -C <dir> checkout fi<TAB>' did not complete 'file', which has
   been corrected.
   (merge 05e2ab1f31 jc/complete-checkout later to maint).

 * The trailer parsing machinery has been updated to avoid mistaking
   lines that begin with a URL (e.g., 'https://...') as trailer lines.
   This prevents intended textual URLs from being mangled or mistakenly
   treated as metadata keys.

 * The instructions for deprecated commands emitted by
   you_still_use_that() have been reworded to clarify that the removal
   decision is final and to provide more assertive guidance on finding
   a replacement.
   (merge 8ace32221c jc/you-still-use-that later to maint).

 * The zsh completion script (in 'contrib/') has been updated to
   correctly locate the Git command after global options like '-C' by
   properly skipping them, similar to how the bash completion does.

 * The git worktree repair command failed to rewrite the .git file of
   a working tree from a relative path to an absolute path when the
   command was run in the working tree itself.  The
   read_gitfile_gently() function was modified to also return whether
   the path originally recorded in the file was absolute, and this new
   capability is used to correctly detect such mismatches.

 * GitHub Actions CI workflow runs triggered by pull requests have
   been configured to cancel older runs when a new push is made to the
   same pull request.
   (merge a251b1bd21 hn/ci-cancel-stale-pr-runs later to maint).

 * The string extraction logic for the branch name and worktree name
   from the given path in 'git worktree add' has been corrected and
   simplified to avoid out-of-bounds reads and improper handling of
   trailing slashes.
   (merge 2e8a9d94b0 rs/worktree-add-basename-fixes later to maint).

 * The CI job for Debian 11 has been updated to use Debian 12, as the
   former is now out of the LTS period.
   (merge 00fa850235 jk/ci-bump-debian-to-12 later to maint).

 * The CI script to install dependencies for the documentation build
   has been updated to install asciidoctor directly via the system
   package manager instead of pinning to an older version via gem.
   Additionally, an obsolete variable used for retired Azure Pipelines
   environments has been removed.

 * Teach 'am', 'revert', and 'rebase' that running 'commit --amend' or a
   partial 'commit <paths>' makes no sense during operations that stop
   and return control to the user to resolve conflicts left in the
   working tree, just like 'cherry-pick' and 'merge' do.
   (merge cc499d40e5 en/no-amend-during-conflicts later to maint).

 * The error path in 'git submodule--helper' has been updated to plug a
   memory leak when a repository handle could not be obtained,
   leveraging an updated idempotent repo_clear().
   (merge 2c03739705 jk/submodule-error-leak later to maint).

 * Two members in "struct pathspec_item" were of type "char *", but
   nobody updated the string through these pointers.  They have been
   made "const char *" instead.
   (merge 88d06b1c91 jc/pathspec-match-const later to maint).

 * The gitdatamodel documentation page has been linked from a handful
   of key documentaiton pages.
   (merge ec602484bd kh/doc-datamodel later to maint).

 * Running "git history" in a corrupt repository can (unsurprisingly)
   segfault when a necessary tree object is not found.
   (merge 76621488e8 jc/history-missing-tree-errorfix later to maint).

 * The development helper script to lint gitlink references in the
   documentation has been updated to avoid a newer Perl regular
   expression syntax that breaks on older Perl versions.
   (merge 8a631963a9 ta/lint-gitlink-older-perl-fix later to maint).

 * The autostash fallback in 'git checkout -m' has been refined to only
   retry when there are local changes.  Additionally, a blank line now
   visually separates autostash conflict advice from the subsequent
   branch-switch message.
   (merge 2ba77ea828 hn/checkout-m-autostash-refine later to maint).

 * The memory leak caused by not unusing the commit buffer returned by
   repo_logmsg_reencode() during the rewording operation in 'git
   history' has been plugged.

 * The pathspec matching logic has been updated to avoid out-of-bounds
   memory accesses when a negative pathspec is shorter than the common
   prefix of positive pathspecs.

 * Other code cleanup, docfix, build fix, etc.
   (merge 026636128f ss/submittingpatches-typofix later to maint).
   (merge d2af22cc21 jc/rerere-doc-typofix later to maint).
   (merge c486c1df72 hk/typofix later to maint).