1.5.6

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 ;-)