著者献本 (Author's complimentary copy?)

Somebody wrote a Git book and published it in China.

And sent an author's complimentary copy to me across Pacific. Very nice. I am reasonably sure that Linus is going to receive the same.

Unfortunately I cannot read Chinese, and I can only guess what each section is teaching, but it nevertheless is nice to feel that our work is appreciated.

Thanks, Jiang Xin (蒋鑫).

Fun with bisecting

You receive a series to fix an old bug, and the patches apply cleanly to your mainline. It even came with its own test suite to make sure that the fix is correct. It's a maintainer's heaven!

You apply them and run tests, and all seem to go well.

But this series is meant to fix an old bug, so you would want to back-port it on top of an older maintenance branch. After spending some time running "git rebase -i" and resolving conflicts, everything compiles. Victory!

Not so fast. The tests start to fail.

Perhaps you botched the back-porting effort? After merging the older maintenance branch with the series with the tip of the current mainline, you find that it gives the identical result as your earlier attempt to apply the series directly on top of the mainline. There wasn't any mistake in conflict resolution you did.

Now what?

Cycle 1.7.7 begins

During the first week since 1.7.6 release...

• Merged topics that have been cooking in the next branch for a while to the master branch to release them as part of 1.7.7 release;
• Updated the Git Calendar for the next cycle.

As I ended up working on some topics around large-ish objects during the last cycle, I may continue to do so during this cycle as well. I am currently looking at a few aspects of pack-objects and fsck.

Queued 19 patches from 8 people.
Made 18 merges to 'master' branch, to include in the next release.
Made 35 merges to 'next' branch for public testing.
Made 2 merges to 'maint' branch, to include in the maintenance release.