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.