[ANNOUNCE] GIT 0.99.7

I am hoping that sending this out to the kernel list is not considered too much of useless spamming, but I promise I wouldn't do thit next time for 0.99.8, if I hear from somebody not to.

Here comes GIT 0.99.7

--

Done in 0.99.7 ==============

Organization ~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some commands and most scripts are renamed for consistency.

  - We have an official standard terminology list [*1*].  To
    match this, commands that operate on index files now have
    'index' instead of 'cache' in their names, and ones that
    download are called 'fetch' instead of 'pull'.

  - We used to install most of the commands that happen to be
    implemented as scripts as 'git-*-script', which was
    cumbersome to remember and type unless you always used 'git'
    wrapper.  They lost '-script' suffix from their names.

For now, we install synonyms as symbolic links so that old names continue to work, but they are planned to be removed in 0.99.8 (or later if there are enough objections on the list -- so far I have heard none).

Also ancient environment variables [*2*] are not supported anymore.

New Features and Commands ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Downloaders that are not fully git aware have been taught about the mechanism to borrow objects from other repositories via objects/info/alternates the server side may be using. 'git fetch' and 'git pull' commands over rsync and http transport should be able to handle such repositories [*3*].

People found interesting cases where the 'stupid' three-way merge mechanism does the wrong thing without noticing. We have two new merge algorithms by Daniel and Fredrik that attempt to do better in such cases. A new 'git merge' command has been introduced to make it easier to experiment with and choose among different merge strategies. Note that 'git pull' still uses the traditional three-way merge after downloading, but it is expected to be switched to use 'git merge' sometime in the future.

Importing from tla archives has been improved and documentated.

'git branch' command acquired '-d' flag to delete a branch that has already been merged into the current branch.

'git bisect' command is easier to use by logging the earlier good/bad choices and make it replayable.

'git repack' has -a' flag to pack the whole repository into a single pack.

'git grep' is a new command to run grep on files 'git' knows about.

Fixes ~~~~~

* 'git-diff-*' commands used to mark copy/rename incorrectly
  when an (A,B) => (B,C) rename was made.  We said the new B is
  a copy of old A, not a rename of old A.

* When the user exported CDPATH into environment, 'cd' took
  scripts to unexpected places.  Unset it upfront to guard us.

* 'git format-patch' knows about 'git cherry' and skips patches
  already merged upstream.

* hopefully plugged memory leak in diffcore-rename properly.

* commit walkers incorrectly assumed having a commit means we
  have the whole history leading up to it -- which is not true
  if the previous download was interrupted.  As a safety
  measure, we now only trust the commits that are pointed by the
  existing refs.

* 'git rev-list' uses a lot less memory.

* The build should be a bit friendlier to Solaris and Darwin now.

* 'git ssh-{push,pull}' are friendlier to tcsh.

* http transport is nicer to caching proxies.

* 'git daemon' port is registered with IANA.

* Many documentation updates.

[Footnotes] *1* http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/glossary.html

*2* Ancient environment variable names: SHA1_FILE_DIRECTORIES AUTHOR_DATE AUTHOR_EMAIL AUTHOR_NAME COMMIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL COMMIT_AUTHOR_NAME SHA1_FILE_DIRECTORY

*3* But not grafts.