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.

* 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.

 * 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-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.