GIT v1.6.0 Release Notes
========================
User visible changes
--------------------
With the default Makefile settings, most of the programs are now
installed outside your $PATH, except for "git", "gitk" and
some server side programs that need to be accessible for technical
reasons. Invoking a git subcommand as "git-xyzzy" from the command
line has been deprecated since early 2006 (and officially announced in
1.5.4 release notes); use of them from your scripts after adding
output from "git --exec-path" to the $PATH is still supported in this
release, but users are again strongly encouraged to adjust their
scripts to use "git xyzzy" form, as we will stop installing
"git-xyzzy" hardlinks for built-in commands in later releases.
An earlier change to page "git status" output was overwhelmingly unpopular
and has been reverted.
Source changes needed for porting to MinGW environment are now all in the
main git.git codebase.
By default, packfiles created with this version uses delta-base-offset
encoding introduced in v1.4.4. Pack idx files are using version 2 that
allows larger packs and added robustness thanks to its CRC checking,
introduced in v1.5.2 and v1.4.4.5. If you want to keep your repositories
backwards compatible past these versions, set repack.useDeltaBaseOffset
to false or pack.indexVersion to 1, respectively.
We used to prevent sample hook scripts shipped in templates/ from
triggering by default by relying on the fact that we install them as
unexecutable, but on some filesystems, this approach does not work.
They are now shipped with ".sample" suffix. If you want to activate
any of these samples as-is, rename them to drop the ".sample" suffix,
instead of running "chmod +x" on them. For example, you can rename
hooks/post-update.sample to hooks/post-update to enable the sample
hook that runs update-server-info, in order to make repositories
friendly to dumb protocols (i.e. HTTP).
GIT_CONFIG, which was only documented as affecting "git config", but
actually affected all git commands, now only affects "git config".
GIT_LOCAL_CONFIG, also only documented as affecting "git config" and
not different from GIT_CONFIG in a useful way, is removed.
The ".dotest" temporary area "git am" and "git rebase" use is now moved
inside the $GIT_DIR, to avoid mistakes of adding it to the project by
accident.
An ancient merge strategy "stupid" has been removed.
Updates since v1.5.6
--------------------
(subsystems)
* git-p4 in contrib learned "allowSubmit" configuration to control on
which branch to allow "submit" subcommand.
* git-gui learned to stage changes per-line.
(portability)
* Changes for MinGW port have been merged, thanks to Johannes Sixt and
gangs.
* Sample hook scripts shipped in templates/ are now suffixed with
*.sample.
* perl's in-place edit (-i) does not work well without backup files on Windows;
some tests are rewritten to cope with this.
(documentation)
* Updated howto/update-hook-example
* Got rid of usage of "git-foo" from the tutorial and made typography
more consistent.
* Disambiguating "--" between revs and paths is finally documented.
(performance, robustness, sanity etc.)
* index-pack used too much memory when dealing with a deep delta chain.
This has been optimized.
* reduced excessive inlining to shrink size of the "git" binary.
* verify-pack checks the object CRC when using version 2 idx files.
* When an object is corrupt in a pack, the object became unusable even
when the same object is available in a loose form, We now try harder to
fall back to these redundant objects when able. In particular, "git
repack -a -f" can be used to fix such a corruption as long as necessary
objects are available.
* Performance of "git-blame -C -C" operation is vastly improved.
* git-clone does not create refs in loose form anymore (it behaves as
if you immediately ran git-pack-refs after cloning). This will help
repositories with insanely large number of refs.
* core.fsyncobjectfiles