I hope that today's git-annex release will be landing in Debian unstable toward the end of the month. And I'm looking forward to some changes that have been blocked by wanting to keep git-annex buildable on Debian 7.

Yesterday I got rid of the SHA dependency, switching git-annex to use a newer version of cryptohash for HMAC generation (which its author Vincent Hanquez kindly added to it when I requested it, waay back in 2013). I'm considering using the LambdaCase extension to clean up a lot of the code next, and there are 500+ lines of old yesod compatability code I can eventually remove.

These changes and others will prevent backporting to the soon to be Debian oldstable, but the standalone tarball will still work there. And, the git-annex-standalone.deb that can be installed on any version of Debian is now available from the NeuroDebian repository, and its build support has been merged into the source tree.

In the run up to the release today, I also dealt with getting the Windows build tested and working, now that it's been updated to newer versions of rsync, ssh, etc from Cygwin. Had to add several more dlls to the installer. That testing also turned up a case where git-annex init could fail, which got a last-minute fix.

PS, scroll down this 10 year of git timeline and see what you find!