"The latest feature release GIT 1.5.5 is available at the usual places," began Git maintainer Junio Hamano, adding "we kept this cycle just slightly over two months, as the previous 1.5.4 cycle was painfully tooooo long."

Git is a distributed version control system that was originally written by Linus Torvalds in April of 2005. It was written to be only a temporary replacement for BitKeeper, which Linus had been using to manage kernel source code since February of 2002. Junio Hamano took over maintainership of Git in July of 2005, and the tool has long since become quite popular outside of even Linux kernel development. Regarding the latest stable release, Junio highlighted some of the changes, including:

"Comes with git-gui 0.10.1; bunch of portability improvement patches coming from an effort to port to Solaris has been applied; 'git fetch' over the native git protocol used to make a connection to find out the set of current remote refs and another to actually download the pack data. We now use only one connection for these tasks; 'git commit' does not run lstat(2) more than necessary anymore; bash completion script (in contrib) are aware of more commands and options; a catch-all 'color.ui' configuration variable can be used to enable coloring of all color-capable commands, instead of individual ones such as 'color.status' and 'color.branch'; bash completion's prompt helper function can talk about operation in-progress (e.g. merge, rebase, etc.); 'git help' can use different backends to show manual pages and this can be configured using 'man.viewer' configuration; 'git gui' learned an auto-spell checking; 'git checkout' and 'git remote' are rewritten in C; two conflict hunks that are separated by a very short span of common lines are now coalesced into one larger hunk, to make the result easier to read."

"The latest feature release GIT 1.5.4 is available at the usual places," began Git maintainer Junio Hamano. He continued, "it has been an unusually long cycle. 5 months since the last feature release 1.5.3 was really a bit too long. But I hope it was worth waiting for. Thanks everybody for working hard to improve it." He noted that there were 165 contributers resulting in 684 changed files, included 70,435 insertions and 28,984 deletions.

The Git distributed version control system was originally written by Linus Torvalds in April of 2005 to temporarily replace BitKeeper, which he had been using to manage kernel source code since February of 2002. Junio Hamano took over maintainership of Git a few months later, in July of 2005, and the tool has long since become quite popular outside of even Linux kernel development. Regarding the latest stable release, Junio highlighted some of the changes, including:

"Comes with much improved gitk, with i18n; comes with git-gui 0.9.2 with i18n; progress displays from many commands are a lot nicer to the eye; rename detection of diff family while detecting exact matches has been greatly optimized; 'git diff' sometimes did not quote paths with funny characters properly; various Perforce importer updates; 'git clean' has been rewritten in C; 'git push' learned --dry-run option to show what would happen if a push is run; 'cvs' is recognized as a synonym for 'git cvsserver', so that CVS users can be switched to git just by changing their login shell; 'git add -i' UI has been colorized; 'git commit' has been rewritten in C; 'git bisect' learned 'skip' action to mark untestable commits; 'git svn' wasted way too much disk to record revision mappings between svn and git, a new representation that is much more compact for this information has been introduced to correct this; in addition there are quite a few internal clean-ups."

"As most folks are probably now well aware, Junio has been offline for about 11 days and may still be offline for a little while more," Shawn Pearce explained regarding git maintainer Junio Hamano's recent absence from Git development. He noted, "I'm not going to get into the specific details as it is Junio's business and not mine. But I can say that my thoughts and prayers to $DEITY are with him and his family at this time, and I don't expect him to be rushing back to git work tomorrow. However I'm quite certain that Junio will return when he can."

Shawn continued on explaining, "I've decided to step up and try to fill Junio's shoes. To that end I am publishing a maint, master, next (and soon) pu branch from a new fork on repo.or.cz" He offered links to his new git development trees, and followed up in another email summarizing recent changes. He noted, "I based my branches on top of the last items published by Junio, and am hoping that he will be open to pulling directly from these before he starts working again. Junio obviously has the option not to pull from me, but if I do my job of interim maintainer well I can probably talk him into it. :)"

Petr Baudis announced the creation of a homepage for git, the directory content manager used to manage the Linux kernel. Git was originally written by Linus Torvalds in early April of 2005 [story], and is now maintained by Junio Hamano [story]. Other online resources available for the tool include a tutorial that walks through the process of setting up and using git, a man page, and the gitweb interface providing easy browsing of the many kernel trees managed by git. The new webpage explains:

"GIT falls into the category of distributed source code management tools, similar to Arch or Darcs (or, in the commercial world, BitKeeper). Every GIT working directory is a full-fledged repository with full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access to a central server."

The git directory content manager was born in early April of 2005 [story], less than a week after the announcement that BitKeeper would no longer be available free of charge to kernel developers [story]. The tool was originally written by Linux creator Linus Torvalds, and rapidly evolved with the help of an active developer community which Linus repeatedly noted he hoped would eventually take over [story]. A scant two months after development on the tool began, the 2.6.12 kernel was released, managed by git [story].

Now, Linus has announced that Junio Hamano is the new git maintainer. "I always said I didn't really want to maintain it in the long run," Linus explained, "and maybe some of you thought I was just saying that, especially as the weeks dragged out to over three months, but hey, that's just because this thing ended up being a bit bigger and more professional than I originally even envisioned." He went on to note that Junio was the obvious choice, and that this change means he will be able to return his full focus to the Linux Kernel mailing list.

Junio thanked those involved, described his development methods, and discussed the upcoming 1.0 release. Regarding 1.0, he suggested that all features are in, and that he is primarily looking for bugfixes and documentation updates. Following the announcement, Ryan Anderson posted an updated "Git 1.0 Synopis", a brief overview of the tool and its features. His document begins, "Git, sometimes called 'global information tracker', is a 'directory content manager'. Git has been designed to handle absolutely massive projects with speed and efficiency, and the release of the 2.6.12 and (soon) the 2.6.13 version of the Linux kernel would indicate that it does this task well."