Git 1.7.8.1

The latest maintenance release Git 1.7.8.1 is available.  Note that this
is not a release with new features (upcoming 1.7.9 is expected to be
released late January next year to include the pulling of signed tags and
other goodies).

Please upgrade to get the accumulated bugfixes since 1.7.8 release from:

  http://code.google.com/p/git-core/downloads/list

and their SHA-1 checksums are:


198e23e6e50245331590a6159ccdbdbe1792422c  git-1.7.8.1.tar.gz
8f674dba39d9ae78928abfe9d924b0855e283e98  git-htmldocs-1.7.8.1.tar.gz
b49ce0b4da4f85671693c9b2c6f6a8b8ee65c809  git-manpages-1.7.8.1.tar.gz

• In some codepaths (notably, checkout and merge), the ignore patterns recorded in $GIT_DIR/info/exclude were not honored. They now are.
• "git apply --check" did not error out when given an empty input without any patch.
• "git archive" mistakenly allowed remote clients to ask for commits that are not at the tip of any ref.
• "git checkout" and "git merge" treated in-tree .gitignore and exclude file in $GIT_DIR/info/ directory inconsistently when deciding which untracked files are ignored and expendable.
• LF-to-CRLF streaming filter used when checking out a large-ish blob fell into an infinite loop with a rare input.
• The function header pattern for files with "diff=cpp" attribute did not consider "type *funcname(type param1,..." as the beginning of a function.
• The error message from "git diff" and "git status" when they fail to inspect changes in submodules did not report which submodule they had trouble with.
• After fetching from a remote that has very long refname, the reporting output could have corrupted by overrunning a static buffer.
• "git pack-objects" avoids creating cyclic dependencies among deltas when seeing a broken packfile that records the same object in both the deflated form and as a delta.

 Also contains minor fixes and documentation updates.