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.