"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."

Jakub Jelinek announced the availability of GCC 4.3.1 saying, "GCC 4.3.1 is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.3.0 relative to previous GCC releases." He adds the standard tag, "as always, a vast number of people contributed to this GCC release -- far too many to thank individually!"

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection which includes C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada compilers. Download GCC 4.3.1 from your nearest gcc.gnu.org mirror.

Joseph Myers announced the availability of GCC 4.2.4 saying, "GCC 4.2.4 is a bug-fix release, containing fixes for regressions in GCC 4.2.3 relative to previous GCC releases." He adds, "as always, a vast number of people contributed to this GCC release -- far too many to thank individually!"

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection which includes C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada compilers. Download GCC 4.2.4 from your nearest gcc.gnu.org mirror.

Open Graphics Project founder Timothy Miller recently noted on the project's mailing list that they are set to announce that their first hardware, the OGD1, is ready for pre-order. "The OGD1 design has actually been finished for a couple of months now," he began, explaining that they've been setting up a way to process pre-orders for the first 100 boards. The board will retail at $1,500, with a $100 discount offered for the first 100 pre-orders. "These are pre-orders, not orders, Timothy continued, "that means the lead time is unpredictable. We don't have a stock. We will purchase a stock based on the number of pre-orders we get. Also, this means that if we never get a large enough number of pre-orders, we will be unable to fulfill them; all pre-orders would be canceled, and no one would be charged anything." He then explained that though the OGD1 could function as a graphics card, it is instead offered as a competitively priced FPGA development kit, "we need to make it clear what OGD1 is and why buying one is an important step for Free Software," adding:

"OGD1 is for hardware hackers. This isn't just about graphics. If all you wanted was a graphics card that worked with Free Software, we've had that for a long time with Matrox, for some time with Intel, and most recently and significantly with ATI. Where our graphics pipeline will be competitive is in embedded systems. As for long-term goals of this project, there are many different types of peripherals for which we do not have good Free Software support; for instance, wifi. But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. OGD1 is for hardware hackers. It's for the community of people who want to tinker with their own hardware ideas, students who want to learn, and professionals who need a prototyping platform. And of course full schematics and design details for OGD1 are offered under the GPL."

KernelTrap is actively seeking sponsorship for September and October of 2007.

Markus Friedl announced the release of OpenSSH 3.9, "a 100% complete SSH protocol version 1.3, 1.5 and 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support."

ReactOS 0.2 is now available for download. ReactOS is an Open Source operating system that aims to be compatible with Microsoft(R) Windows(R) applications and drivers. The main functionality change in this latest release is that of booting into the graphical ROS Explorer. The changelog details the complete list of changes for this release and screenshots are available.

The ReactOS project is an open-source GPL clone of Windows NT. Despite it having originated from Microsoft, the NT architecture is interesting and somewhat unique. Having an alternative implementation of Windows NT is a good thing from both political and technical aspects.

Their current code is capable of compiling ReactOS under ReactOS and running some basic demonstrations of graphical applications. The project's latest release was v0.1.4 on October 11'th. Find the current project status and screenshots on their project page.

Mark Mitchell commented today on the gcc-announce mailing list that the recent GCC 3.3.1 release [story] includes a new file titled 'README.SCO', expressing outrage at SCO's recent legal actions against the Linux kernel. From the document:

"As all users of GCC will know, SCO has recently made claims concerning alleged copyright infringement by recent versions of the operating system kernel called Linux. SCO has made irresponsible public statements about this supposed copyright infringement without releasing any evidence of the infringement, and has demanded that users of Linux, the kernel most often used with the GNU system, pay for a license. This license is incompatible with the GPL, and in the opinion of the Free Software Foundation such a demand unquestionably violates the GNU General Public License under which the kernel is distributed."

The statement goes on to discuss the possibility of dropping GCC support for the SCO Unix platform in protests, noting however that at this time it would be more of an inconvenience to users than SCO itself, "but we cannot indefinitely continue to ignore the aggression against our community taken by a party that has long profited from the commercial distribution of our programs. We urge users of SCO Unix to make clear to SCO their disapproval of the company's aggression against the free software community." Read on for the full statement, written by Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen.

GCC 3.3 was released today. Mark Mitchell announced the release saying:

"This release contains a very large number of bug-fixes relative to GCC 3.2.3, and a number of new features. See this page for a more complete list of changes."

GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection. This first release in the 3.3 line follows the earlier GCC 3.2.3 [story] by nearly a month. The next release will be 3.3.1, targeting bugs found in 3.3. Mention is made again of targets that have been marked obsolete, and will be removed in 3.4 [story]. Read on for the complete announcement.

GCC 3.2.3 - the last in the 3.2 series - was released on April 25. It is a bugfix release, no new features in there. This one is a follow up to GCC 3.2.2 [story].

Markus Friedl announced the release of OpenSSH 3.6 today, five months after the release of version 3.5 [story]. Today's release includes a number of enhancements, including RSA blinding to avoid potential timing attacks against RSA keys, bandwidth limiting for 'scp', and a progress bar and improved error handling for 'sftp'.

OpenSSH 3.6 is available for download now, and will also be part of the upcoming OpenBSD 3.3 release available on May 1'st. Read on for the release announcement, including full details as to what's new in this verison.