Git 1.7.8-rc2 and the road forward

The second release candidate, that is not much different from the first one, is out.

The reason why this is not tagged as the 1.7.8 final is because we want to make sure there is no regression since 1.7.7, and the reason why this is not so different from the first one is because no such regression has been found that needs fixing, which is a good thing.

I have been working on a handful of topics for the development cycle after 1.7.8, and these topics all share the same theme: giving better ways to users so that they can assure themselves that their patches that flow over the public channel are not tampered with, and also helping them communicate more clearly among themselves in general.

• A new change originates from a contributor, who has a theme in mind to achieve a specific goal. There is a new feature in the branch command that allows a descriptive text to be added to a topic branch and this facility can be used to record and update that "theme/goal" when starting to work on the topic and while polishing it.
• The contributor, after perfecting the topic, would request the resulting history to be pulled by the integrator. This pull-request traditionally gave only the list of commits on the topic and did not encourage the contributor to clearly describe what the topic was about. The branch description will be copied to the resulting message in the updated version of request-pull command.
• The integrator will receive the pull request in e-mail, but typically PGP signed e-mails are hard to use. The updated version of request-pull command does not use PGP signing on pull-request e-mails, either, but the contributor can ask the integrator to pull a signed tag, instead of the tip of a branch, using the updated pull command.
• When the integrator records the result of a pull request, traditionally the command did not open editor to encourage the integrator to describe the merge. The updated version of merge does this when responding to a request to merge a signed tag, and shows the result of PGP verification of the tag in the comment to help the integrator.
• In addition, the contributor can optionally add PGP signature to individual commit with the updated commit command.

So far, things are looking reasonably good for these topics.