User visible changes
--------------------
-[[Note that none of these are not merged to 'master' as of this writing
-but they will be before 1.6.0 happens]]
-
-With default Makefile settings, most of the programs are now installed
-outside your $PATH, except for "git", "gitk", "git-gui" and some server
-side programs that needs to be accessible when connecting over ssh.
-
-When talking to remote repository over ssh, necessary server side programs
-are now invoked with "git $program" notation, not with "git-$program"
-notation. This should work with both servers running older git where you
-had all of these programs installed on $PATH, or newer git where you have
-only "git" on $PATH. However, if the remote side is running a custom
-software that restricts programs you can run over ssh, it might cause
-problems. Use --upload-pack="git-upload-pack" (when using ls-remote,
-fetch and pull on the client side), --receive-pack="git-receive-pack"
-(when using push on the client side), or --exec="git-upload-archive" (when
-using git-archive) as appropriate when talking to such a remote.
+With the default Makefile settings, most of the programs are now
+installed outside your $PATH, except for "git", "gitk" and
+some server side programs that need to be accessible for technical
+reasons. Invoking a git subcommand as "git-xyzzy" from the command
+line has been deprecated since early 2006 (and officially announced in
+1.5.4 release notes); use of them from your scripts after adding
+output from "git --exec-path" to the $PATH is still supported in this
+release, but users are again strongly encouraged to adjust their
+scripts to use "git xyzzy" form, as we will stop installing
+"git-xyzzy" hardlinks for built-in commands in later releases.
+
+An earlier change to page "git status" output was overwhelmingly unpopular
+and has been reverted.
Source changes needed for porting to MinGW environment are now all in the
main git.git codebase.
+By default, packfiles created with this version uses delta-base-offset
+encoding introduced in v1.4.4. Pack idx files are using version 2 that
+allows larger packs and added robustness thanks to its CRC checking,
+introduced in v1.5.2 and v1.4.4.5. If you want to keep your repositories
+backwards compatible past these versions, set repack.useDeltaBaseOffset
+to false or pack.indexVersion to 1, respectively.
+
+We used to prevent sample hook scripts shipped in templates/ from
+triggering by default by relying on the fact that we install them as
+unexecutable, but on some filesystems, this approach does not work.
+They are now shipped with ".sample" suffix. If you want to activate
+any of these samples as-is, rename them to drop the ".sample" suffix,
+instead of running "chmod +x" on them. For example, you can rename
+hooks/post-update.sample to hooks/post-update to enable the sample
+hook that runs update-server-info, in order to make repositories
+friendly to dumb protocols (i.e. HTTP).
+
+GIT_CONFIG, which was only documented as affecting "git config", but
+actually affected all git commands, now only affects "git config".
+GIT_LOCAL_CONFIG, also only documented as affecting "git config" and
+not different from GIT_CONFIG in a useful way, is removed.
+
+The ".dotest" temporary area "git am" and "git rebase" use is now moved
+inside the $GIT_DIR, to avoid mistakes of adding it to the project by
+accident.
+
+An ancient merge strategy "stupid" has been removed.
+
Updates since v1.5.6
--------------------
(subsystems)
+* git-p4 in contrib learned "allowSubmit" configuration to control on
+ which branch to allow "submit" subcommand.
+
+* git-gui learned to stage changes per-line.
+
(portability)
+* Changes for MinGW port have been merged, thanks to Johannes Sixt and
+ gangs.
+
* Sample hook scripts shipped in templates/ are now suffixed with
- *.sample. We used to prevent them from triggering by default by
- relying on the fact that we install them as unexecutable, but on
- some filesystems this approach does not work. Instead of running
- "chmod +x" on them, the users who want to activate these samples
- as-is can now rename them dropping *.sample suffix.
+ *.sample.
* perl's in-place edit (-i) does not work well without backup files on Windows;
some tests are rewritten to cope with this.
* Updated howto/update-hook-example
-(performance, robustness etc.)
+* Got rid of usage of "git-foo" from the tutorial and made typography
+ more consistent.
+
+* Disambiguating "--" between revs and paths is finally documented.
+
+(performance, robustness, sanity etc.)
+
+* index-pack used too much memory when dealing with a deep delta chain.
+ This has been optimized.
* reduced excessive inlining to shrink size of the "git" binary.
repack -a -f" can be used to fix such a corruption as long as necessary
objects are available.
+* Performance of "git-blame -C -C" operation is vastly improved.
+
* git-clone does not create refs in loose form anymore (it behaves as
if you immediately ran git-pack-refs after cloning). This will help
repositories with insanely large number of refs.
objects created will be fsync'ed (this is only useful on filesystems
that does not order data writes properly).
+* "git commit-tree" plumbing can make Octopus with more than 16 parents.
+ "git commit" has been capable of this for quite some time.
+
(usability, bells and whistles)
+* even more documentation pages are now accessible via "man" and "git help".
+
+* A new environment variable GIT_CEILING_DIRECTORIES can be used to stop
+ the discovery process of the toplevel of working tree; this may be useful
+ when you are working in a slow network disk and are outside any working tree,
+ as bash-completion and "git help" may still need to run in these places.
+
+* By default, stash entries never expire. Set reflogexpire in [gc
+ "refs/stash"] to a reasonable value to get traditional auto-expiration
+ behaviour back
+
+* Longstanding latency issue with bash completion script has been
+ addressed. This will need to be backmerged to 'maint' later.
+
+* pager.<cmd> configuration variable can be used to enable/disable the
+ default paging behaviour per command.
+
+* "git-add -i" has a new action 'e/dit' to allow you edit the patch hunk
+ manually.
+
+* git-am records the original tip of the branch in ORIG_HEAD before it
+ starts applying patches.
+
+* git-apply can handle a patch that touches the same path more than once
+ much better than before.
+
+* git-apply can be told not to trust the line counts recorded in the input
+ patch but recount, with the new --recount option.
+
+* git-apply can be told to apply a patch to a path deeper than what the
+ patch records with --directory option.
+
* git-archive can be told to omit certain paths from its output using
export-ignore attributes.
+* git-archive uses the zlib default compression level when creating
+ zip archive.
+
+* git-archive's command line options --exec and --remote can take their
+ parameters as separate command line arguments, similar to other commands.
+ IOW, both "--exec=path" and "--exec path" are now supported.
+
+* With -v option, git-branch describes the remote tracking statistics
+ similar to the way git-checkout reports by how many commits your branch
+ is ahead/behind.
+
+* git-branch's --contains option used to always require a commit parameter
+ to limit the branches with; it now defaults to list branches that
+ contains HEAD if this parameter is omitted.
+
+* git-branch's --merged and --no-merged option used to always limit the
+ branches relative to the HEAD, but they can now take an optional commit
+ argument that is used in place of HEAD.
+
+* git-bundle can read the revision arguments from the standard input.
+
+* git-cherry-pick can replay a root commit now.
+
+* git-clone can clone from a remote whose URL would be rewritten by
+ configuration stored in $HOME/.gitconfig now.
+
+* "git-clone --mirror" is a handy way to set up a bare mirror repository.
+
+* git-cvsserver learned to respond to "cvs co -c".
+
+* git-diff --check now checks leftover merge conflict markers.
+
+* "git-diff -p" learned to grab a better hunk header lines in
+ BibTex, Pascal/Delphi, and Ruby files and also pays attention to
+ chapter and part boundary in TeX documents.
+
+* When remote side used to have branch 'foo' and git-fetch finds that now
+ it has branch 'foo/bar', it refuses to lose the existing remote tracking
+ branch and its reflog. The error message has been improved to suggest
+ pruning the remote if the user wants to proceed and get the latest set
+ of branches from the remote, including such 'foo/bar'.
+
* fast-export learned to export and import marks file; this can be used to
interface with fast-import incrementally.
-* Original SHA-1 value for "update-ref -d" is optional now.
+* fast-import and fast-export learned to export and import gitlinks.
+
+* "gitk" left background process behind after being asked to dig very deep
+ history and the user killed the UI; the process is killed when the UI goes
+ away now.
+
+* git-rebase records the original tip of branch in ORIG_HEAD before it is
+ rewound.
+
+* "git rerere" can be told to update the index with auto-reused resolution
+ with rerere.autoupdate configuration variable.
+
+* git-rev-parse learned $commit^! and $commit^@ notations used in "log"
+ family. These notations are available in gitk as well, because the gitk
+ command internally uses rev-parse to interpret its arguments.
+
+* git-rev-list learned --children option to show child commits it
+ encountered during the traversal, instead of showing parent commits.
+
+* git-send-mail can talk not just over SSL but over TLS now.
+
+* git-shortlog honors custom output format specified with "--pretty=format:".
+
+* "git-stash save" learned --keep-index option. This lets you stash away the
+ local changes and bring the changes staged in the index to your working
+ tree for examination and testing.
+
+* git-stash also learned branch subcommand to create a new branch out of
+ stashed changes.
+
+* git-status gives the remote tracking statistics similar to the way
+ git-checkout reports by how many commits your branch is ahead/behind.
+
+* "git-svn dcommit" is now aware of auto-props setting the subversion user
+ has.
* You can tell "git status -u" to even more aggressively omit checking
untracked files with --untracked-files=no.
+* Original SHA-1 value for "update-ref -d" is optional now.
+
* Error codes from gitweb are made more descriptive where possible, rather
than "403 forbidden" as we used to issue everywhere.
(internal)
+* git-merge has been reimplemented in C.
+
Fixes since v1.5.6
------------------
All of the fixes in v1.5.6 maintenance series are included in
this release, unless otherwise noted.
- * diff -c/--cc showed unnecessary "deletion" lines at the context
- boundary (needs backmerge to maint).
+ * git-clone ignored its -u option; the fix needs to be backported to
+ 'maint';
+
+ * git-mv used to lose the distinction between changes that are staged
+ and that are only in the working tree, by staging both in the index
+ after moving such a path.
- * "git-clone <src> <dst>" did not create leading directories for <dst>
- like the scripted version used to do (needs backport to maint).
+ * "git-rebase -i -p" rewrote the parents to wrong ones when amending
+ (either edit or squash) was involved, and did not work correctly
+ when fast forwarding.
----
-exec >/var/tmp/1
-O=v1.5.6.1-77-gf9a08f6
-echo O=$(git describe refs/heads/master)
-git shortlog --no-merges $O..refs/heads/master ^refs/heads/maint