There are quite a few changes and (welcomed) fixes: please see
the release notes in ${WRKSRC}/Documentation/RelNotes-1.5.4.
A small subset of the changes are included here.
Added
-----
* i18n support for gitk.
Removal
-------
* "git svnimport" was removed in favor of "git svn". It is still there
in the source tree (contrib/examples) but unsupported.
* As git-commit and git-status have been rewritten, "git runstatus"
helper script lost all its users and has been removed.
Fixes since v1.5.3 (unique to the 1.5.4 branch)
------------------
These fixes are only in v1.5.4 and not backported to v1.5.3 maintenance
series.
* The way "git diff --check" behaves is much more consistent with the way
"git apply --whitespace=warn" works.
* "git svn" talking with the SVN over HTTP will correctly quote branch
and project names.
* "git config" did not work correctly on platforms that define
REG_NOMATCH to an even number.
* Recent versions of AsciiDoc 8 has a change to break our
documentation; a workaround has been implemented.
* "git diff --color-words" colored context lines in a wrong color.
Also, update to 1.5.3.7.
Fixes since v1.5.3.6
--------------------
* git-send-email added 8-bit contents to the payload without
marking it as 8-bit in a CTE header.
* "git-bundle create a.bndl HEAD" dereferenced the symref and
did not record the ref as 'HEAD'; this prevented a bundle
from being used as a normal source of git-clone.
* The code to reject nonsense command line of the form
"git-commit -a paths..." and "git-commit --interactive
paths..." were broken.
* Adding a signature that is not ASCII-only to an original
commit that is ASCII-only would make the result non-ASCII.
"git-format-patch -s" did not mark such a message correctly
with MIME encoding header.
* git-add sometimes did not mark the resulting index entry
stat-clean. This affected only cases when adding the
contents with the same length as the previously staged
contents, and the previous staging made the index entry
"racily clean".
* git-commit did not honor GIT_INDEX_FILE the user had in the
environment.
* When checking out a revision, git-checkout did not report where the
updated HEAD is if you happened to have a file called HEAD in the
work tree.
* "git-rev-list --objects" mishandled a tree that points at a
submodule.
* "git cvsimport" was not ready for packed refs that "git gc" can
produce and gave incorrect results.
* Many scripted Porcelains were confused when you happened to have a
file called "HEAD" in your work tree.
* Miscellaneous updates to the user manual and documentation.