On 11th February 2010 the latest release candidate for Git v1.7.0 was made available for download and testing.

This is hoped to be the final Git release candidate before the official production release of Git 1.7.0 expected in the next few days.

The download is available from the normal git release points:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/

git-1.7.0.rc2.tar.{gz,bz2} (source tarball)
git-htmldocs-1.7.0.rc2.tar.{gz,bz2} (preformatted docs)
git-manpages-1.7.0.rc2.tar.{gz,bz2} (preformatted docs)

The RPM binary packages for a few architectures are found in:

testing/git-*-1.7.0.rc2-1.fc11.$arch.rpm (RPM)

Clearvision provide Git Training (including Git eLearning), Git Support for both large and small organisations, Git Consulting and also Git related products such as our Application Lifecycle Management interface for Git Agile UCM4Git.

Details of the Release can be found in the Release Notes below:

Git v1.7.0 Release Notes (draft)
========================

Notes on behaviour change
-------------------------

• "git push" into a branch that is currently checked out (i.e. pointed by HEAD in a repository that is not bare) is refused by default.
  
  Similarly, "git push $there :$killed" to delete the branch $killed in a remote repository $there, when $killed branch is the current branch pointed at by its HEAD, will be refused by default.
  
  Setting the configuration variables receive.denyCurrentBranch and receive.denyDeleteCurrent to 'ignore' in the receiving repository can be used to override these safety features.
• "git send-email" does not make deep threads by default when sending a patch series with more than two messages. All messages will be sent as a reply to the first message, i.e. cover letter.
  
  It has been possible to configure send-email to send "shallow thread" by setting sendemail.chainreplyto configuration variable to false. The only thing this release does is to change the default when you haven't configured that variable.
• "git status" is not "git commit --dry-run" anymore. This change does not affect you if you run the command without argument.
• "git diff" traditionally treated various "ignore whitespace" options only as a way to filter the patch output. "git diff --exit-code -b" exited with non-zero status even if all changes were about changing the amount of whitespace and nothing else. and "git diff -b" showed the "diff --git" header line for such a change without patch text.
  
  In this release, the "ignore whitespaces" options affect the semantics of the diff operation. A change that does not affect anything but whitespaces is reported with zero exit status when run with --exit-code, and there is no "diff --git" header for such a change.
• External diff and textconv helpers are now executed using the shell. This makes them consistent with other programs executed by git, and allows you to pass command-line parameters to the helpers. Any helper paths containing spaces or other metacharacters now need to be shell-quoted. The affected helpers are GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF in the environment, and diff.*.command and diff.*.textconv in the config file.
• The --max-pack-size argument to 'git repack', 'git pack-objects', and 'git fast-import' was assuming the provided size to be expressed in MiB, unlike the corresponding config variable and other similar options accepting a size value. It is now expecting a size expressed in bytes, with a possible unit suffix of 'k', 'm', or 'g'.