0.99.9 on Saturday next week.

We have been at version "0.99.8.GIT" for too long, and maintenance branch is now up to 0.99.8f.

When git-daemon was deployed on kernel.org machines, I wanted to stabilize things a bit so that we can feature freeze and do a real 1.0. Recently we have changed things quite a bit, but having them only in the "master" branch without having an official release for some time kept Porcelains in limbo. I am sure both Pasky and Catalin want to start updating Cogito and StGIT to take advantage of what the new core offers, but they cannot just randomly use new features only available in the "master" branch and expect people to use 0.99.8.GIT version of unknown vintage.

So here is a heads-up to list what to expect in 0.99.9. I am not promising that 0.99.9 will be followed by 1.0 -- it could well be 0.99.10.

The "master" branch, not counting barebone Porcelainish scripts that real Porcelains would not utilize, contains the following additions and enhancements. Many of them have been forward ported to 0.99.8 maintenance branch already:

 - Cygwin (HPA).
 - Configuration files (Linus).
 - core.filemode to tell not to trust working tree mode bits.
 - git-daemon (HPA).
 - git-symbolic-ref for platforms with/without symlinks (Linus).
 - sparse .git/object/??/ directory (Linus).
 - git-update-ref.
 - funny pathnames quoted in C-style.
 - sha1^{} and sha1^{type} notation.
 - git-ls-remote reports object names tags point to.
 - git-apply operates in a sparse tree.
 - git-diff records which blob each patch applies to.
 - git-format-patch; --stdout and rev ranges.
 - git-update-index --index-info.
 - git-read-tree -m -u removes empty directories.
 - git-http-fetch drives multiple connections (Nick Hengeveld).
 - git-http-fetch is safer with funny-characters.
 - the name of packfile is more stable.
 - clone-pack keeps the pack unpacked.
 - git-check-ref-format; ref names are stricter than before.
 - git-pack-files --local (Linus).
 - fetch-pack git+ssh:// and ssh+git:// (Linus).
 - svn import (Matthias).
 - ls-tree filename listing bugfix (Robert Fitzsimons).
 - git-index-pack (Sergey).

In addition, we have handful things cooking in the proposed updates branch. I expect these to come to some conclusion by the end of next week, and 0.99.9 will contain what's ready by then:

 - rev-list --dense (Linus).
 - fetch-pack further improvements (Johannes).
 - pack-objects using cached results.

Although we had a good proposal for protocol rewrite from HPA and discussions that followed, it appeared to me that the change might be a bit too backward incompatible while the advantage was not obvious enough -- I do not think we have a consensus on it. 0.99.9 will not wait for this discussion to conclude.

One last request. If you have sent bugfixes in the C-part of the code (i.e. really core) that I have not applied without a good reason, please remind me. I do not think I have dropped or postponed-then-forgot anything, but I just want to be sure. I am really in stabilization mood this week.