[ANNOUNCE] Git 1.6.5.5

The latest maintenance release Git 1.6.5.5 is available at the usual places:

  http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/

  git-1.6.5.5.tar.{gz,bz2}			(source tarball)
  git-htmldocs-1.6.5.5.tar.{gz,bz2}		(preformatted docs)
  git-manpages-1.6.5.5.tar.{gz,bz2}		(preformatted docs)

The RPM binary packages for a few architectures are found in:

  RPMS/$arch/git-*-1.6.5.5-1.fc11.$arch.rpm	(RPM)

This is primarily to help other distros with older xmlto to partially revert the change in 1.6.5.4 to help distros with newer docbook stylesheets, but I also merged some fixes that have already been cooking and graduated to 'master' as well.

Git v1.6.5.5 Release Notes ==========================

Fixes since v1.6.5.4 --------------------

 * Manual pages can be formatted with older xmlto again.

 * GREP_OPTIONS exported from user's environment could have broken
   our scripted commands.

 * In configuration files, a few variables that name paths can begin with
   ~/ and ~username/ and they are expanded as expected.  This is not a
   bugfix but 1.6.6 will have this and without backporting users cannot
   easily use the same ~/.gitconfig across versions.

 * "git diff -B -M" did the same computation to hash lines of contents
   twice, and held onto memory after it has used the data in it
   unnecessarily before it freed.

 * "git diff -B" and "git diff --dirstat" was not counting newly added
   contents correctly.

 * "git format-patch revisions... -- path" issued an incorrect error
   message that suggested to use "--" on the command line when path
   does not exist in the current work tree (it is a separate matter if
   it makes sense to limit format-patch with pathspecs like that
   without using the --full-diff option).

 * "git grep -F -i StRiNg" did not work as expected.

 * Enumeration of available merge strategies iterated over the list of
   commands in a wrong way, sometimes producing an incorrect result.

 * "git shortlog" did not honor the "encoding" header embedded in the
   commit object like "git log" did.

 * Reading progress messages that come from the remote side while running
   "git pull" is given precedence over reading the actual pack data to
   prevent garbled progress message on the user's terminal.

 * "git rebase" got confused when the log message began with certain
   strings that looked like Subject:, Date: or From: header.

 * "git reset" accidentally run in .git/ directory checked out the
   work tree contents in there.

Other minor documentation updates are included.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Changes since v1.6.5.4 are as follows:

Avery Pennarun (1):
      builtin-merge.c: call exclude_cmds() correctly.

Brandon Casey (1):
      t4201: use ISO8859-1 rather than ISO-8859-1

Brian Collins (1):
      grep: Allow case insensitive search of fixed-strings

Felipe Contreras (2):
      format-patch: fix parsing of "--" on the command line
      format-patch: add test for parsing of "--"

Jeff King (4):
      diffcore-break: free filespec data as we go
      diffcore-break: save cnt_data for other phases
      rerere: don't segfault on failure to open rr-cache
      reset: improve worktree safety valves

Junio C Hamano (7):
      diffcore-rename: reduce memory footprint by freeing blob data early
      Documentation: avoid xmlto input error
      Protect scripted Porcelains from GREP_OPTIONS insanity
      Remove dead code from "git am"
      Documentation: xmlto 0.0.18 does not know --stringparam
      Prepare for 1.6.5.5
      Git 1.6.5.5

Linus Torvalds (1):
      Fix diff -B/--dirstat miscounting of newly added contents

Lukas Sandström (1):
      git am/mailinfo: Don't look at in-body headers when rebasing

Matthew Ogilvie (1):
      core.autocrlf documentation: mention the crlf attribute

Matthieu Moy (4):
      Expand ~ and ~user in core.excludesfile, commit.template
      expand_user_path: expand ~ to $HOME, not to the actual homedir.
      merge-recursive: point the user to commit when file would be overwritten.
      user-manual: Document that "git merge" doesn't like uncommited changes.

Nicolas Pitre (1):
      give priority to progress messages

Philippe Bruhat (1):
      Make sure $PERL_PATH is defined when the test suite is run.

Raman Gupta (1):
      Add branch management for releases to gitworkflows

Ramsay Allan Jones (3):
      Makefile: merge two Cygwin configuration sections into one
      t9700-perl-git.sh: Fix a test failure on Cygwin
      git-count-objects: Fix a disk-space under-estimate on Cygwin

René Scharfe (2):
      mergetool--lib: simplify guess_merge_tool()
      archive: clarify description of path parameter

Tim Henigan (2):
      Update 'git remote update' usage string to match man page.
      git remote: Separate usage strings for subcommands

Todd Zullinger (1):
      Documentation: Avoid use of xmlto --stringparam

Uwe Kleine-König (1):
      shortlog: respect commit encoding

Sorry if posting as a reply to the announcement is improper. However I am noticing that some kind of shell-like expansion is now allowed in the config file, wrt home directories, and my wish is somehow related to it.

I wonder if it could be possible in future releases to expand also $HOSTNAME in fetch/push specs.

The use case is the following. Working on more than one machine (e.g. a laptop A and a desktop B) you might need to periodically push to a server C and like to share the same config on both machines. Having $HOSTNAME expansion, whatever machine you push from, you can say git push C and have the branches go on remote/A or remote/B automatically on the server.

Sergio