What's new:

*) Revived and thoroughly refreshed web presence at http://www.macports.org/ , with more improvements still on the way;
*) New project guide temporarily at http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/ ;


Overview of Changes from MacPorts 1.5.2 to MacPorts 1.6.0:

# For regular usage:

*) Fixed the "upgrade" target of the port(1) command to properly handle installed versions beginning with letters;
*) Improved the "variants" target of the port(1) command to behave like the "info" target to poll the requested Portfile directly
    rather than the index for more up-to-date information, while also providing a --index flag for legacy behavior;
*) Fixed a bug by which a user specific 'macports.conf' file would not be read;
*) Tightened security by installing MacPorts in 0755 mode (no write permission for group and others) by default;
*) Added 'none' as a possible option for supported types of startupitems scripts;
*) Disabled readline support in interactive mode of the port(1) command by deafult;
*) Fixed a bug by which the "variants" target of the port(1) command would spit out an error backtrace to the terminal when no match
    was found for the requested port;

# Individual port-building related improvements:

*) Eugene Pimenov's GSoC2007 work on improving "trace mode" for the building of ports in clean environments,
    http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/wiki/soc2007/epimenov ;
*) Added 'bsdmake' and 'gnumake' defaults for building ports on the FreeBSD and Linux platforms;
*) Added 'configureccache' and 'configuredistcc' configuration options to the main 'macports.conf' for distributed
    builds (defaulting to no);
*) Improved building of configure-based universal ports on Leopard;
*) Fixed a bug by which the 'universal' variant would disappear if a 'macosx' variant was selected;
*) Added a 'macosx_deployment_target' option to the main 'macports.conf' file for ports that benefit form this Mac OS X specific flag;
*) Added a 'configurepipe' option to the main 'macports.conf' file for using pipes rather than intermediate files when compiling C/C++
    based ports;
*) Removed LD_PREBIND & LD_PREBIND_ALLOW_OVERLAP variables from MacPorts' environment to prevent prebinding of binaries, which can be harmful
    on Tiger and above;


# Packaging related improvements:

*) Created pkg's no longer have /etc, /var/ or /tmp directories in them;
*) Fixed a bug by which all .mpkg packages were missing their welcome page;
*) Fixed a bug by which HTML contents were written as a pkg's Welcome.rtf file, causing it to not display at all;
*) Made the homepage clickable in a pkg's welcoming screen;
*) Added support lzma compression for archives;
*) Improved pkg & dmg creation on Leopard, for both Intel and PowerPC platforms;
*) Added an 'mdmg' target, for the creation of a dmg for a port and its dependencies;
*) Dramatically improved performace of the port(1) command's Portfile level actions like "file", "dir", "work" and "url"


# For Portfile writers:

*) Added more compiler suites as options to the 'configure.compiler' Portfile option;
*) Added 'configure.fflags' 'configure.fcflags' 'configure.f90flags' Portfile options for Fortran based ports;
*) Added 'configure.javac' and 'configure.classpath' Portfile options for Java ports;
*) Added 'configure.objc' 'configure.objcflags' Portfile options for Objective-C based ports;
*) Added 'build.nice' and 'build.jobs' Portfile options for parallel builds and build prioritizing;
*) Added 'startupitem.netchange' boolean flag Portfile option for generated startup scripts;
*) Added a "lint" target to the port(1) command, for Portfile verification and beautification;
*) Added Portfile group code for Python 3.0 based ports and deprecated the plain 'python' group code;
*) Added generic GNU livecheck rules;
*) The "x86" platform has been normalized as "i386";
*) Added a 'use_parallel_build' Portfile option for declaring if a particular port can be built in paralel through make's -j flag,
    defaulting to no;
*) Added 'configure.awk', 'configure.bison', 'configure.pkg_config', 'configure.pkg_config_path' Portfile options to point to the
    relevant programs/paths to use;
*) Added a 'extract.mkdir' Portfile option to better deal with so-called "tar bombs";
*) Added a 'configure.pipe' Portfile option for using pipes rather than intermediate files when compiling C/C++ based ports;


# For MacPorts scripting:

*) Moved the 'ui_isset' and 'global_option_isset' Tcl procedures for testing of the UI and global options to the macports1.0 API
    sparing its clients from having to implement them;
*) Improved defaults for implicit ui_prefix and ui_channels behaviour at the macports1.0 layer;


# Miscellaenous:

*) Added MacPorts-configure time checks for Mac OS X and Xcode versions and warnings for old versions;
*) Added a 'user-agent' parameters to our libcurl based fetching of sources for sites that require a user agent;
*) 'livecheck' regular expressions are now checked against each entry in the listed master_site in the Portfile;
*) Fixed regexp in livecheck code to work when there is both a tag and a subdir in the mirror uri;
*) Improved the integrated "daemondo" program to better handle the death of startupitem-based programs;
*) Added a "--restart-wait=n" argument to the integrated "daemondo" program to control the number of seconds to wait during restart of
    the process it is monitoring, defaulting to 3;
*) Enabled building of our objc bridge against GNUStep on platforms other than Mac OS X;
*) Added support for packing of MacPorts itself on FreeBSD and Fedora platforms;
*) Added SourceForge.jp to our list of SourceForge based mirrors for sources fetching;
*) Added http mirror sites for the postgresql mirrors list;
*) Added the ftp://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/ mirror to the GNU mirrors list;
*) Fixed a bug by which paths with embedded spaces would cause the "dp2mp-move" upgrade code to fail when trying to find user specific
    'macports.conf' files;