Monday, November 28, 2011

Git 1.7.8-rc4 and upcoming cycle

This cycle is taking a bit longer than I had hoped but this should be the last rc before the final.

We had to roll in a fix to the UI for a new feature added in this cycle to "revert/cherry-pick" to avoid costly migration in the later releases (originally, we introduced "--reset" action to discard the in-progress state of a multi-commit revert/cherry-pick sequence, but it was argued that what the action actually did was "--quit" in the sense that it does not reset the state to some known state. Renaming it to "--quit" further opened the door to introduce "--abort" which does revert the state to where the entire revert/cherry-pick sequence started).

The next cycle will have many interesting topics that are already cooking in various doneness, including:
  • local branch description (in addition to a good discipline of giving descriptive branch names) that can be used in various places including pull request messages, local merge messages and format-patch cover letters;
  • electronically signed pull requests by asking to pull a signed tag instead of a branch;
  • signed commit (possibly-if it is found useful, that is);
  • credential helper API to integrate with platform native keychain implementations;
  • progress eye-candy for fsck and repack;
  • "git add" of large contents will send blobs directly to a packfile;
  • side-by-side diff in gitweb; and
  • i18n of Git Porcelain messages.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is the "local branch description" functionality written-up anywhere yet?

Thanks.

_ said...

Install the still-in-development version and look at "git branch" documentation.