"The latest feature release GIT 1.6.0 is available at the usual places," began Git maintainer, Junio Hamano, announcing the latest stable release of the distributed version control system originally written by Linus Torvalds. Among the current changes, Junio noted, "with the default Makefile settings, most of the programs are now installed outside your $PATH, except for 'git', 'gitk' and some server side programs that need to be accessible for technical reasons." He continued, "by default, packfiles created with this version uses delta-base-offset
encoding introduced in v1.4.4. Pack idx files are using version 2 that allows larger packs and added robustness thanks to its CRC checking, introduced in v1.5.2 and v1.4.4.5." Julio highlighted several other changes, including the addition of a '.sample' extension to the default trigger scripts to be sure they don't execute in a default install, and the removal of the 'stupid' merge strategy. Other changes include:

"Git-gui learned to stage changes per-line; Reduced excessive inlining to shrink size of the 'git' binary; When an object is corrupt in a pack, the object became unusable even when the same object is available in a loose form, we now try harder to fall back to these redundant objects when able; performance of 'git-blame -C -C' operation is vastly improved; even more documentation pages are now accessible via 'man' and 'git help'; longstanding latency issue with bash completion script has been addressed; pager. configuration variable can be used to enable/disable the default paging behaviour per command; git-cvsserver learned to respond to 'cvs co -c'; 'git-diff -p' learned to grab a better hunk header lines in BibTex, Pascal/Delphi, and Ruby files and also pays attention to chapter and part boundary in TeX documents; error codes from gitweb are made more descriptive where possible, rather than '403 forbidden' as we used to issue everywhere; git-merge has been reimplemented in C."

"As promised, this cycle was short and the release is with only relatively small impact changes," said Git maintainer Junio Hamano, announcing the release of Git v1.5.6. He noted that both gitk and git-gui have been updated. To improve portability, when running "git init", git now autodetects whether or not a filesystem is case insensitive, and updates a new configuration variable accordingly. Dependencies on the 'cpio' and 'curl' binaries have also been removed. Among the changes improving performance, the "git clone" command has been rewritten in C. Other changes include:

"'git bisect help' gives longer and more helpful usage information; 'git branch' (and 'git checkout -b') can be told to set up branch..rebase automatically, so that later you can say 'git pull' and magically cause 'git pull --rebase' to happen; 'git cherry-pick' and 'git revert' can add a sign-off; 'git commit' mentions the author identity when you are committing somebody else's changes; 'git log' and friends learned the '--graph' option to show the ancestry graph at the left margin of the output; 'git send-email' now can send out messages outside a git repository; 'git svn' learned --add-author-from option to propagate the authorship by munging the commit log message; new object creation and looking up in 'git svn; has been optimized."

"The http://www.kerneloops.org website collects kernel oops and warning reports from various mailing lists and bugzillas as well as with a client users can install to auto-submit oopses," began Arjan van de Ven, referring to a website first announced last December. He summarized, "this week, a total of 3670 oopses and warnings have been reported, compared to 3029 reports in the previous week." The 'kerneloops' client is available from the project's web page, and is now being included by multiple distributions. Arjan explains, "in addition to Fedora, Debian now has included the client application in their default GUI install targets, thanks a lot for that!" He went on to discuss some recent changes:

"This week, based on feedback, I've split the report into 'untainted' and 'caused by proprietary drivers'. Let me know if I should continue doing this or if the old format was better.

"As an experiment (on request) I've exported the database to text files (one file per report) and stuck it in a git repository. You can take a look with git clone git://www.kerneloops.org/ Suggestions for improving the format of this are obviously very welcome, as are 'yes useful' and 'no not useful' comments. Again, this is an experiment, if it's not seen as useful I may discontinue it."

"Is there a write up of what you consider the 'proper' git workflow?" Theodore Ts'o asked Linux creator Linus Torvalds, "why do you consider rebasing topic branches a bad thing?" Linus replied, "rebasing branches is absolutely not a bad thing for individual developers. But it *is* a bad thing for a subsystem maintainer." He went on to differentiate between 'grunts' who write the code and 'managers' who primarily collect other people's code, "a grunt should use 'git rebase' to keep his own work in line. A technical manager, while he hopefully does some useful work on his own, should strive to make _others_ do as much work as possible, and then 'git rebase' is the wrong thing, because it will always make it harder for the people around you to track your tree and to help you update your tree." Linus compared his own patch management style and productivity from over six years ago before he started using BK and git, to his current style using git:

"You can either try to drink from the firehose and inevitably be bitched about because you're holding something up or not giving something the attention it deserves, or you can try to make sure that you can let others help you. And you'd better select the 'let other people help you', because otherwise you _will_ burn out. It's not a matter of 'if', but of 'when'. [...] And when you're in that kind of ballpark, you should at least think of yourself as being where I was six+ years ago before BK. You should really seriously try to make sure that you are *not* the single point of failure, and you should plan on doing git merges. [...] I think a lot of people are a lot happier with how I can take their work these days than they were six+ years ago."

"This time around, we have 60+% of the changes in drivers, notably drives/video and drivers/media, with some infiniband, networking and usb lovin' to fill things out," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.26-rc3 kernel. "The rest is (as usual) mostly arch updates," he continued, "this time mostly mips, m68k and uml." Linus noticed that Linux kernel development has been managed with git now as long as it was managed with BitKeeper, a little over three years for both tools. He explained, "the most striking difference has nothing to do with git or BK (the switch-over timing was just the reason I decided to take a look), but with the fact that we're not just continuing to develop, but we're developing faster and with more people," adding:

"So during the three years 2002->2005, we had 63,428 commits, attributed to 1,560 different authors (caveat: misspellings etc will mean that some people get counted more than once). During the last three years, we've had 96,885 attributed to 4,068 distinct authors (with the same caveat, obviously).

"I didn't do a lot of per-commit statistics yet, but from the little I've done it also seems like we've gotten increasingly better at doing small commits (which is probably one of the reasons we have a larger number of them, but also why we have more authors - small commits is how people get into doing kernel development)."

"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."

"Google Summer of Code 2008 is on! Over the past three years, the program has brought together over 1500 students and 2000 mentors from 90 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. We look forward to welcoming more new contributors and projects this year," begins a page listing all the projects planning to participate in this year's GSoC. Among the numerous planned participtants there are many kernel projects, including DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, Git, GNU/Hurd, Linux, Minix, and NetBSD.

Student applications for GSoC projects begin today, running through the end of the month. Read on for many of the participation announcements from the above projects. For more information about the GSoC, the program's FAQ explains:

"Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with a several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Historically, the program has brought together over 1,500 students with over 130 open source projects to create millions of lines of code. The program, which kicked off in 2005, is now in its fourth year."

"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."

"Yes, I know ... another tree, just what everyone wants," quipped James Bottomley, announcing his new merge candidate (-mc) tree:

"This one has a specific purpose: It's my tree tracking everyone else's git and quilt trees so I get early warning if there are going to be any merge issues. However, it struck me it might be useful to anyone wishing to track what's going upstream more closely."

James noted that his new tree is available in git, and being automatically built each night. "As you can see from the reverts and the skips, we have trouble even now (and that's after I fixed up most of the failures in SCSI). ACPI and the x86 trees clash hideously, so I kicked out x86. Jens' block tree has two patches which clash with Bart's ide quilt. Greg actually has one patch in his tree that clashes with one of mine." He also noted, "this tree is currently very storage centric (i.e. I haven't included net trees or quilts because I didn't think they'd be likely to clash with my SCSI trees). However, if it could be more generally useful, I could add other trees and quilts to it."

"This lovely dark 4am is as good an occasion as any to offer to you the 5th issue of the msysGit Herald, the not-quite-biweekly news letter to keep you informed about msysGit, the effort to bring one of the most powerful Source Code Management systems to the poor souls stuck with Windows," began Johannes Schindelin on the git mailing list. He noted that the project was finally concentrating on getting git to work on Windows, having finally gotten the installer working. The Git on MSys project home page notes,

"Unfortunately, Git on Windows is only officially supported using Cygwin. However, there is a fork (hopefully to be merged with 'official' git real soon now) which enables you to compile git using MinGW/MSys. It is a little bit tricky to get ahold of everything needed (MSys, iconv, Tcl/Tk, gcc, make, zlib, regex, etc.), so this project tries to provide a single .zip (actually, a 7-Zip packed installer) which you can unpack, and by double-clicking on msys.bat everything is set. You can start right away to hack on your favourite Source Code Management tool."

Paul Mackerras merged an updated version of gitk into his master branch. Gitk is a git repository browser. New features include improve searching, "thus you can now search for commits that modify certain files or directories, or commits that add/remove a given string, as well as searching for commits by commit message, author, committer or headline." Paul also noted two performance improvements, "gitk now uses a new graph layout algorithm, which means it doesn't have to generate the whole layout from top to bottom at startup time, making startup faster," and, "gitk caches the topology information used for the previous/next tag and branch information, making startup faster."

Linus Torvalds noted some display annoyances, but responded favorably to the performance improvements, "*huge* improvements. It is now really nice to start up gitk even on the full kernel history." He made some suggestions for additional improvements, then added, "but this has both the layout performance improvements and the fixes to only show selected files in the diff view by default, so I hope this gets merged into standard git soon.."