git/Documentation/RelNotes-1.5.6.txt

GIT v1.5.6 Release Notes
========================

Updates since v1.5.5
--------------------

(subsystems)

* Comes with updated gitk and git-gui.

(portability)

* git will build on AIX better than before now.

* core.ignorecase configuration variable can be used to work better on
  filesystems that are not case sensitive.

* "git init" now autodetects the case sensitivity of the filesystem and
  sets core.ignorecase accordingly.

* cpio is no longer used; neither "curl" binary (libcurl is still used).

(documentation)

* Many freestanding documentation pages have been converted and made
  available to "git help" (aka "man git<something>") as section 7 of
  the manual pages. This means bookmarks to some HTML documentation
  files may need to be updated (eg "tutorial.html" became
  "gittutorial.html").

(performance)

* "git clone" was rewritten in C.  This will hopefully help cloning a
  repository with insane number of refs.

* "git rebase --onto $there $from $branch" used to switch to the tip of
  $branch only to immediately reset back to $from, smudging work tree
  files unnecessarily.  This has been optimized.

* Object creation codepath in "git-svn" has been optimized by enhancing
  plumbing commands git-cat-file and git-hash-object.

(usability, bells and whistles)

* "git add -p" (and the "patch" subcommand of "git add -i") can choose to
  apply (or not apply) mode changes independently from contents changes.

* "git bisect help" gives longer and more helpful usage information.

* "git bisect" does not use a special branch "bisect" anymore; instead, it
  does its work on a detached HEAD.

* "git branch" (and "git checkout -b") can be told to set up
  branch.<name>.rebase automatically, so that later you can say "git pull"
  and magically cause "git pull --rebase" to happen.

* "git branch --merged" and "git branch --no-merged" can be used to list
  branches that have already been merged (or not yet merged) to the
  current branch.

* "git cherry-pick" and "git revert" can add a sign-off.

* "git commit" mentions the author identity when you are committing
  somebody else's changes.

* "git diff/log --dirstat" output is consistent between binary and textual
  changes.

* "git filter-branch" rewrites signed tags by demoting them to annotated.

* "git format-patch --no-binary" can produce a patch that lack binary
  changes (i.e. cannot be used to propagate the whole changes) meant only
  for reviewing.

* "git init --bare" is a synonym for "git --bare init" now.

* "git gc --auto" honors a new pre-auto-gc hook to temporarily disable it.

* "git log --pretty=tformat:<custom format>" gives a LF after each entry,
  instead of giving a LF between each pair of entries which is how
  "git log --pretty=format:<custom format>" works.

* "git log" and friends learned the "--graph" option to show the ancestry
  graph at the left margin of the output.

* "git log" and friends can be told to use date format that is different
  from the default via 'log.date' configuration variable.

* "git send-email" now can send out messages outside a git repository.

* "git send-email --compose" was made aware of rfc2047 quoting.

* "git status" can optionally include output from "git submodule
  summary".

* "git svn" learned --add-author-from option to propagate the authorship
  by munging the commit log message.

* new object creation and looking up in "git svn" has been optimized.

* "gitweb" can read from a system-wide configuration file.

(internal)

* "git unpack-objects" and "git receive-pack" is now more strict about
  detecting breakage in the objects they receive over the wire.


Fixes since v1.5.5
------------------

All of the fixes in v1.5.5 maintenance series are included in
this release, unless otherwise noted.

And there are too numerous small fixes to otherwise note here ;-)