As some of you seem to have noticed even before the announcement by Linus, the official GIT repository at kernel.org is now owned by me. As Linus said in his message, this does not mean he is leaving us, so please do not panic.
I would like to thank everybody on the GIT list for what we have achieved so far. Getting your ideas blown away and still being able to feel happy about it is a privilege granted only to those who are fortunate enough to work with very talented people. It has been quite a fun experience for me.
I would also like to thank Twin Sun Inc (my employer) and NEC for promising to support me working on GIT on a part time basis from now on. I expect to be spending 8 to 12 day-job hours per week; evenings and weekends are my own time as before. My tentative plan is to make Wednesdays and Saturdays my primary GIT days.
Earlier, I was producing as many patches as ideas cross my mind, throwing all of them at the list to see which ones stick, relying on somebody with a good taste upstream to drop all the bad ones. Although it has been fun working that way with Linus, regrettably, I ended up wasting a lot of his time.
I will slow down and be more careful as the "shepherd of the main repository" from now on. At least for now, you will see patches from me posted on the list like everybody else's, before they hit the main repository.
In other words, I will make you my "adult supervision," so please help me out by raising objections, giving alternatives, or just plainly saying "your patch is ugly".
Some of you may have also noticed that the main GIT repository has an extra branch, "pu" ("proposed updates"). My patches, along with patches from others I collect from the list that I intend to eventually apply, will first go there, before hitting the master branch. You can probably tell, by looking at this branch, what my priorities are, which patches are being considered, and responses to which ones I am still waiting for. Please note that I expect to rewind and rebase this branch quite often.
I was planning to talk about the remaining tasks for 1.0 in this message when Linus asked me if I wanted to take over the core GIT project a couple of weeks ago. But I think we have done most, if not all, of what we would want to have in 1.0 since then. Of course there are still ongoing discussions for various improvements, but I feel that that can continue without blocking the 1.0 pre-release engineering process. Please keep bugfixes and documentation updates flowing.
After the 1.0 release, I plan to start a branch for 1.0 maintenance, separate from the "master" branch. I think the intent of having GIT RPM support, which was done before me, was to force Pasky's hand to split core part from the Cogito package, but as the prerequisite for the split to happen, the interface to the core GIT part must be reasonably stable. We operated without even having any formal version numbers for quite some time, which I am sure made Pasky's life more miserable then it should have been. This must be rectified.
I have not decided if we want to use even-odd scheme like the kernel used to have, or just keep the "master" a bleeding edge branch which is occasionally tagged.
That's about it from me for now. Let's continue to have fun!
Linus Torvalds