Roadmap for 1.7.9

I do not do roadmaps, so the title of this message is not quite correct, but I think I should post my current thinking on what have been cooking so far that deserve to be polished further to be in the next release.

I've been aiming for a release cycle that lasts for 8 to 10 weeks, and the last 2 or 3 weeks of a cycle is meant for release candidate testing that we fix only regressions, which means we need to see how much we can do within 5 to 8 weeks. The current cycle is expected to end at the end of January next month [*1*].

I am not so worried about small and obvious fixes and enhancements, and changes in the periphery areas. They can and will be merged as they come and cook long enough in 'next' without issues reported by their users. I expect what have been cooking in 'next' during the feature-freeze before the 1.7.8 release, other than the ones listed below, to be more or less ready already and they should be in 'master' shortly.

Now, here are the biggies that we would want to try to have in reasonable shape before the next release. The list may be a bit too ambitious, given that this cycle overlaps with end-of-this-year/beginning-of-new-year holiday season in various cultures.

 * Credentials and keychain (Peff)
 * Pulling signed tag (me, Linus)
 * Update "request-pull" script with information that matters (me)
 * Revisiting threading of grep (Rene, Thomas Rast)
 * Optimization of reading hierarchical refspace lazily (Michael Haggerty)

I expect the following will not make much progress without further discussion:

 * Signed commit (me)
 * Ignored vs Precious (Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy)
 * Sequencer (Ram, Jonathan Nieder)

I think the following are too big to be ready by the end of this cycle (polishing could and will continue as time permits).

 * Large-files
  - bulk check-in (me)
  - "Chunked" encoding of large files (me)

[Reference]

*1* https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=jfgbl2mrlipp4pb6ieih0qr3so%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/Los_Angeles

On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 21:07, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

I'd like to get the i18n series into 1.7.9 as well. I think it's ready as-is but some minor issues are sure to arise.

If time permits I'd also like to have a series of po/*.po files in as well once it's in "master". Maybe as a submodule, which would be neat in itself as we'd start dogfooding submodules.

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> writes:

Surely.

My impression was that the part that can have interactions with the existing codebase is already in, and it is just the matter of updating what _() ans Q_() actually do, which can be reverted out quickly if it turns out to be necessary, and that was why I didn't count it as part of the "biggies" that make us worry.

On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 23:47, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

That's the gist of it. But it's still a massive 1300 line patch, which:

 * Calls setlocale(LC_MESSAGES)
 * Uses an evil trick to only call setlocale(LC_CTYPE) while loading
   message catalogs
 * Might have some portability problems on more obscure OS's.
 * Has some tests I've only tested on Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris

So it might have some little surprises, and it would be nice to have it in master early on so we'll give it plenty of time to cook and discover any issues before 1.7.9.

On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 3:07 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

I'm working on adding --exclude-standard and --exclude-from to read-tree. Apart from that I don't plan on supporting precious files because I don't use them.