Roadmap for 1.7.9

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

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