I'd like to fetch changesets (to display them somewhere) from a git repository w/o cloning it on my local machine, just like svn does (svn log http://...). Is it something you can do using git? I've looked into the git log documentation but I couldn't find what I needed.
Thanks!
No, Git does not deal in changesets, you have to clone the repository before you can use it. The project in question might have a web interface for the repository which might allow you to create a diff between two arbitrary versions.
You can work with remote repositories without cloning the whole repository, yes. However you are limited in what you do:
To inspect a repository for available branches:
git ls-remote git://url/to/repository.git
To fetch a single branch:
git fetch git://url/to/repository.git branch
This will fetch the branch as FETCH_HEAD you then need to checkout that branch, and can save it to a local branch (otherwise you don't have any direct reference to its head):
git checkout FETCH_HEAD
git checkout -b my-external-branch
If you plan to work with an external repository more often, it makes sense to add it as a remote (even if you don't plan to fetch everything):
git remote add ext-repository git://url/to/repository.git
Then you can either fetch the whole repository:
git fetch ext-repository
or again just single branches:
git fetch ext-repository branch
What about
git log --name-status
looks more or less like svn log ...or
git log -5 --name-status
