If you do not build RPM binary packages from our pristine source, you can safely ignore this release and stop reading this message. Now that the audience of this message has been limited to a narrow target, before I make an announcement, here is a call-for-help to you. Git v2.8 removed README file and added a corresponding README.md file. The change however did not adjust git.spec.in that still referred to README, causing "make rpmbuild" to fail. The breakage was not noticed by anybody who tested v2.8.0-rc0 and later release candidates, and ended up in the final v2.8 release, and we saw a handful of bug reports on the list after the release happened. This maintenance release is to correct this bug for those who run "make rpmbuild". It has no other changes. It is clear that nobody who relies on being able to "make rpmbuild" ever tried any of the 5 release candidate snapshots that happened during Feb 26-Mar 28. We had a whole month and nobody noticed? This incident clearly shows that something needs to happen, if people want "make rpmbuild" to keep working. Even though this maintenance release may fix this single bug, breakages similar to it that only affect "make rpmbuild" users are guaranteed to appear in future releases, unless those who can prevent them from happening start helping to test at least release candidate snapshots. It is even more preferrable if they can test the tip of 'next' branch regularly, in order to prevent such breakages from hitting the 'master' branch to be included in the next release, which is what the other parts of the system aims at. The other obvious option is for us to stop pretending that "make rpmbuild" does anything useful to do and drop the build target and the unmaintained git.spec.in file on which nobody in the active development community keeps eyes. I do not mean this as a threat "help us or else"; there is a precedent. We used to ship our own debian/rules and friends for those who wanted to debbuild from the source, but the Debian packagers wanted to have their own proper ones and ours ended up confusing the users, and we made the world a better place by removing our copy. If "make rpmbuild" people want us to take this route, that is also OK for us. So that's the call for help. Now to the announcement. The latest maintenance release Git v2.8.1 is now available at the usual places. The tarballs are found at: https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/ The following public repositories all have a copy of the 'v2.8.1' tag and the 'maint' branch that the tag points at: url = https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git url = git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git url = git://git.sourceforge.jp/gitroot/git-core/git.git url = git://git-core.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/git-core/git-core url = https://github.com/gitster/git ---------------------------------------------------------------- Git v2.8.1 Release Notes ======================== Fixes since v2.8 ---------------- * "make rpmbuild" target was broken as its input, git.spec.in, was not updated to match a file it describes that has been renamed recently. This has been fixed. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Changes since v2.8.0 are as follows: Junio C Hamano (1): Git 2.8.1 Matthieu Moy (1): git.spec.in: use README.md, not README -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html