The most notable change is that from this release, git merge will start opening the editor just like git commit does. See earlier articles for details.
Git v1.7.10 Release Notes
=========================
Compatibility Notes
-------------------
* From this release on, the "git merge" command in an interactive
session will start an editor when it automatically resolves the
merge for the user to explain the resulting commit, just like the
"git commit" command does when it wasn't given a commit message.
If you have a script that runs "git merge" and keeps its standard
input and output attached to the user's terminal, and if you do not
want the user to explain the resulting merge commits, you can
export GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT environment variable set to "no", like
this:
#!/bin/sh
GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT=no
export GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT
to disable this behavior (if you want your users to explain their
merge commits, you do not have to do anything). Alternatively, you
can give the "--no-edit" option to individual invocations of the
"git merge" command if you know everybody who uses your script has
Git v1.7.8 or newer.
* The "--binary/-b" options to "git am" have been a no-op for quite a
while and were deprecated in mid 2008 (v1.6.0). When you give these
options to "git am", it will now warn and ask you not to use them.
* When you do not tell which branches and tags to push to the "git
push" command in any way, the command used "matching refs" rule to
update remote branches and tags with branches and tags with the
same name you locally have. In future versions of Git, this will
change to push out only your current branch according to either the
"upstream" or the "current" rule. Although "upstream" may be more
powerful once the user understands Git better, the semantics
"current" gives is simpler and easier to understand for beginners
and may be a safer and better default option. We haven't decided
yet which one to switch to.
Updates since v1.7.9
--------------------
UI, Workflows & Features
* various "gitk" updates.
- show the path to the top level directory in the window title
- update preference edit dialog
- display file list correctly when directories are given on command line
- make "git-describe" output in the log message into a clickable link
- avoid matching the UNIX timestamp part when searching all fields
- give preference to symbolic font names like sans & monospace
- allow comparing two commits using a mark
- "gitk" honors log.showroot configuration.
* Teams for localizing the messages from the Porcelain layer of
commands are starting to form, thanks to Jiang Xin who volunteered
to be the localization coordinator. Translated messages for
simplified Chinese, Swedish and Portuguese are available.
* The configuration mechanism learned an "include" facility; an
assignment to the include.path pseudo-variable causes the named
file to be included in-place when Git looks up configuration
variables.
* A content filter (clean/smudge) used to be just a way to make the
recorded contents "more useful", and allowed to fail; a filter can
now optionally be marked as "required".
* Options whose names begin with "--no-" (e.g. the "--no-verify"
option of the "git commit" command) can be negated by omitting
"no-" from its name, e.g. "git commit --verify".
* "git am" learned to pass "-b" option to underlying "git mailinfo", so
that a bracketed string other than "PATCH" at the beginning can be kept.
* "git clone" learned "--single-branch" option to limit cloning to a
single branch (surprise!); tags that do not point into the history
of the branch are not fetched.
* "git clone" learned to detach the HEAD in the resulting repository
when the user specifies a tag with "--branch" (e.g., "--branch=v1.0").
Clone also learned to print the usual "detached HEAD" advice in such
a case, similar to "git checkout v1.0".
* When showing a patch while ignoring whitespace changes, the context
lines are taken from the postimage, in order to make it easier to
view the output.
* "git diff --stat" learned to adjust the width of the output on
wider terminals, and give more columns to pathnames as needed.
* "diff-highlight" filter (in contrib/) was updated to produce more
aesthetically pleasing output.
* "fsck" learned "--no-dangling" option to omit dangling object
information.
* "git log -G" and "git log -S" learned to pay attention to the "-i"
option. With "-i", "log -G" ignores the case when finding patch
hunks that introduce or remove a string that matches the given
pattern. Similarly with "-i", "log -S" ignores the case when
finding the commit the given block of text appears or disappears
from the file.
* "git merge" in an interactive session learned to spawn the editor
by default to let the user edit the auto-generated merge message,
to encourage people to explain their merges better. Legacy scripts
can export GIT_MERGE_AUTOEDIT=no to retain the historical behavior.
Both "git merge" and "git pull" can be given --no-edit from the
command line to accept the auto-generated merge message.
* The advice message given when the user didn't give enough clue on
what to merge to "git pull" and "git merge" has been updated to
be more concise and easier to understand.
* "git push" learned the "--prune" option, similar to "git fetch".
* The whole directory that houses a top-level superproject managed by
"git submodule" can be moved to another place.
* "git symbolic-ref" learned the "--short" option to abbreviate the
refname it shows unambiguously.
* "git tag --list" can be given "--points-at
