-Git v1.7.9 Release Notes (draft)
+Git v1.7.9 Release Notes
========================
Updates since v1.7.8
--------------------
- * Porcelain commands like "git reset" did not distinguish deletions
- and type-changes from ordinary modification, and reported them with
- the same 'M' moniker. They now use 'D' (for deletion) and 'T' (for
- type-change) to match "git status -s" and "git diff --name-status".
+ * gitk updates accumulated since early 2011.
+
+ * git-gui updated to 0.16.0.
+
+ * git-p4 (in contrib/) updates.
+
+ * Git uses gettext to translate its most common interface messages
+ into the user's language if translations are available and the
+ locale is appropriately set. Distributors can drop new PO files
+ in po/ to add new translations.
+
+ * The code to handle username/password for HTTP transactions used in
+ "git push" & "git fetch" learned to talk "credential API" to
+ external programs to cache or store them, to allow integration with
+ platform native keychain mechanisms.
+
+ * The input prompts in the terminal use our own getpass() replacement
+ when possible. HTTP transactions used to ask for the username without
+ echoing back what was typed, but with this change you will see it as
+ you type.
+
+ * The internals of "revert/cherry-pick" have been tweaked to prepare
+ building more generic "sequencer" on top of the implementation that
+ drives them.
+
+ * "git rev-parse FETCH_HEAD" after "git fetch" without specifying
+ what to fetch from the command line will now show the commit that
+ would be merged if the command were "git pull".
+
+ * "git add" learned to stream large files directly into a packfile
+ instead of writing them into individual loose object files.
+
+ * "git checkout -B <current branch> <elsewhere>" is a more intuitive
+ way to spell "git reset --keep <elsewhere>".
+
+ * "git checkout" and "git merge" learned "--no-overwrite-ignore" option
+ to tell Git that untracked and ignored files are not expendable.
+
+ * "git commit --amend" learned "--no-edit" option to say that the
+ user is amending the tree being recorded, without updating the
+ commit log message.
+
+ * "git commit" and "git reset" re-learned the optimization to prime
+ the cache-tree information in the index, which makes it faster to
+ write a tree object out after the index entries are updated.
+
+ * "git commit" detects and rejects an attempt to stuff NUL byte in
+ the commit log message.
+
+ * "git commit" learned "-S" to GPG-sign the commit; this can be shown
+ with the "--show-signature" option to "git log".
* fsck and prune are relatively lengthy operations that still go
silent while making the end-user wait. They learned to give progress
* The set of built-in function-header patterns for various languages
knows MATLAB.
-May also contain documentation updates and code clean-ups.
+ * "git log --format='<format>'" learned new %g[nNeE] specifiers to
+ show information from the reflog entries when walking the reflog
+ (i.e. with "-g").
+
+ * "git pull" can be used to fetch and merge an annotated/signed tag,
+ instead of the tip of a topic branch. The GPG signature from the
+ signed tag is recorded in the resulting merge commit for later
+ auditing.
+
+ * "git log" learned "--show-signature" option to show the signed tag
+ that was merged that is embedded in the merge commit. It also can
+ show the signature made on the commit with "git commit -S".
+
+ * "git branch --edit-description" can be used to add descriptive text
+ to explain what a topic branch is about.
+
+ * "git fmt-merge-msg" learned to take the branch description into
+ account when preparing a merge summary that "git merge" records
+ when merging a local branch.
+
+ * "git request-pull" has been updated to convey more information
+ useful for integrators to decide if a topic is worth merging and
+ what is pulled is indeed what the requestor asked to pull,
+ including:
+
+ - the tip of the branch being requested to be merged;
+ - the branch description describing what the topic is about;
+ - the contents of the annotated tag, when requesting to pull a tag.
+
+ * "git pull" learned to notice 'pull.rebase' configuration variable,
+ which serves as a global fallback for setting 'branch.<name>.rebase'
+ configuration variable per branch.
+
+ * "git tag" learned "--cleanup" option to control how the whitespaces
+ and empty lines in tag message are cleaned up.
+
+ * "gitweb" learned to show side-by-side diff.
+
+Also contains minor documentation updates and code clean-ups.
Fixes since v1.7.8
------------------
- * In some codepaths (notably, checkout and merge), the ignore patterns
- recorded in $GIT_DIR/info/exclude were not honored. They now are.
- (merge fc001b5 nd/maint-ignore-exclude later to maint).
+Unless otherwise noted, all the fixes since v1.7.8 in the maintenance
+releases are contained in this release (see release notes to them for
+details).