Git 1.8.0

Finally.

With help from 82 contributors since 1.7.12 release, and great help from countless reviewers on these changes, a new feature release Git 1.8.0 has been tagged with 497 new non-merge commits. Thanks everybody in the Git development community, and thanks for feature requests and bug reports for everobyd in various Git user communities.

Tarballs of the new release have been pushed out to the usual place, and the public repositories have the histories leading to this release.

For highlights, please refer to earlier entries. The final Release Notes describes everything in gory details.

I'll be on vacation for a few weeks, and I do not plan to carry a computer with me. In the meantime, Jeff King will be acting as an interim maintainer.

Here is a fun fact.

The very initial public appearance of Git consisted of 11 files, 1244 lines in total, v0.99~954 (Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell, 2005-04-07).

Among these 1244 lines, there were 1065 non-empty lines, of which 206 lines still survive to date (v1.8.0).

   surviving     original path (survival%)
          14           40 Makefile (35.00%)
          16          168 README (9.52%)
          51           93 cache.h (54.83%)
           4           23 cat-file.c (17.39%)
           6          172 commit-tree.c (3.48%)
           4           51 init-db.c (7.84%)
          84          259 read-cache.c (32.43%)
           0           43 read-tree.c (0.00%)
           7           81 show-diff.c (8.64%)
          20          248 update-cache.c (8.06%)
           0           66 write-tree.c (0.00%)
         206         1244 Total (16.55%)

Note that this does not mean one sixth of 1.8.0 release was from Linus.