your HEAD, you can go back to an existing
branch with usual "git checkout $branch". Also you can
start a new branch using "git checkout -b $newbranch" to
start a new branch at that commit.
- You can even pull from other repositories, make merges and
commits while your HEAD is detached. Also you can use "git
reset" to jump to arbitrary commit, while still keeping your
HEAD detached.
Remember that a detached state is volatile, i.e. it will be forgotten
as soon as you move away from it with the checkout or reset command,
unless a branch is created from it as mentioned above. It is also
possible to rescue a lost detached state from the HEAD reflog.
* Packed refs
- Repositories with hundreds of tags have been paying large
overhead, both in storage and in runtime, due to the
traditional one-ref-per-file format. A new command,
git-pack-refs, can be used to "pack" them in more efficient
representation (you can let git-gc do this for you).
- Clones and fetches over dumb transports are now aware of
packed refs and can download from repositories that use
them.
* Configuration
- configuration related to color setting are consolidated under
color.* namespace (older diff.color.*, status.color.* are
still supported).
- 'git-repo-config' command is accessible as 'git-config' now.
* Updated features
- git-describe uses better criteria to pick a base ref. It
used to pick the one with the newest timestamp, but now it
picks the one that is topologically the closest (that is,
among ancestors of commit C, the ref T that has the shortest
output from "git-rev-list T..C" is chosen).
- git-describe gives the number of commits since the base ref
between the refname and the hash suffix. E.g. the commit one
before v2.6.20-rc6 in the kernel repository is:
v2.6.20-rc5-306-ga21b069
which tells you that its object name begins with a21b069,
v2.6.20-rc5 is an ancestor of it (meaning, the commit
contains everything -rc5 has), and there are 306 commits
since v2.6.20-rc5.
- git-describe with --abbrev=0 can be used to show only the
name of the base ref.
- git-blame learned a new option, --incremental, that tells it
to output the blames as they are assigned. A sample script
to use it is also included as contrib/blameview.
- git-blame starts annotating from the working tree by default.
* Less external dependency
- We no longer require the "merge" program from the RCS suite.
All 3-way file-level merges are now done internally.
- The original implementation of git-merge-recursive which was
in Python has been removed; we have a C implementation of it
now.
- git-shortlog is no longer a Perl script. It no longer
requires output piped from git-log; it can accept revision
parameters directly on the command line.
* I18n
- We have always encouraged the commit message to be encoded in
UTF-8, but the users are allowed to use legacy encoding as
appropriate for their projects. This will continue to be the
case. However, a non UTF-8 commit encoding _must_ be
explicitly set with i18n.commitencoding in the repository
where a commit is made; otherwise git-commit-tree will
complain if the log message does not look like a valid UTF-8