Documentation for .promise() (http://api.jquery.com/promise/) states "If target is provided, .promise() will attach the methods onto it and then return this object rather than create a new one."

This is not what is happening in 1.7.1.

I am not sure what a good use-case for this is, but the following http://jsfiddle.net/AjXTp/ demonstrates the issue:

var foo = {};

$(document.body).promise("foo", foo);
foo.done(function(){alert("hello");});

If 1.7.1. did what the documentation states then "hello" would be alerted. Instead, there is a javascript error.

Looking at the sources, one can also see that the parameter named 'object' is never used in .promise().

I believe it is either an implementation bug, or a documentation bug.

(Note, this is a report about .promise() (documented at http://api.jquery.com/promise/), not about deferred.promise() (documented at http://api.jquery.com/deferred.promise/).)