Log Message:
Changes 1.7.9:
* gitk updates accumulated since early 2011.
* git-gui updated to 0.16.0.
* git-p4 (in contrib/) updates.
* Git uses gettext to translate its most common interface messages
  into the user's language if translations are available and the
  locale is appropriately set. Distributors can drop new PO files
  in po/ to add new translations.
* The code to handle username/password for HTTP transactions used in
  "git push" & "git fetch" learned to talk \ 
"credential API" to
  external programs to cache or store them, to allow integration with
  platform native keychain mechanisms.
* The input prompts in the terminal use our own getpass() replacement
  when possible. HTTP transactions used to ask for the username without
  echoing back what was typed, but with this change you will see it as
  you type.
* The internals of "revert/cherry-pick" have been tweaked to prepare
  building more generic "sequencer" on top of the implementation that
  drives them.
* "git rev-parse FETCH_HEAD" after "git fetch" without specifying
  what to fetch from the command line will now show the commit that
  would be merged if the command were "git pull".
* "git add" learned to stream large files directly into a packfile
  instead of writing them into individual loose object files.
* "git checkout -B <current branch> <elsewhere>" is a more \ 
intuitive
  way to spell "git reset --keep <elsewhere>".
* "git checkout" and "git merge" learned \ 
"--no-overwrite-ignore" option
  to tell Git that untracked and ignored files are not expendable.
* "git commit --amend" learned "--no-edit" option to say that the
  user is amending the tree being recorded, without updating the
  commit log message.
* "git commit" and "git reset" re-learned the optimization \ 
to prime
  the cache-tree information in the index, which makes it faster to
  write a tree object out after the index entries are updated.
* "git commit" detects and rejects an attempt to stuff NUL byte in
  the commit log message.
* "git commit" learned "-S" to GPG-sign the commit; this can \ 
be shown
  with the "--show-signature" option to "git log".
* fsck and prune are relatively lengthy operations that still go
  silent while making the end-user wait. They learned to give progress
  output like other slow operations.
* The set of built-in function-header patterns for various languages
  knows MATLAB.
* "git log --format='<format>'" learned new %g[nNeE] specifiers to
  show information from the reflog entries when walking the reflog
  (i.e. with "-g").
* "git pull" can be used to fetch and merge an annotated/signed tag,
  instead of the tip of a topic branch. The GPG signature from the
  signed tag is recorded in the resulting merge commit for later
  auditing.
* "git log" learned "--show-signature" option to show the \ 
signed tag
  that was merged that is embedded in the merge commit. It also can
  show the signature made on the commit with "git commit -S".
* "git branch --edit-description" can be used to add descriptive text
  to explain what a topic branch is about.
* "git fmt-merge-msg" learned to take the branch description into
  account when preparing a merge summary that "git merge" records
  when merging a local branch.
* "git request-pull" has been updated to convey more information
  useful for integrators to decide if a topic is worth merging and
  what is pulled is indeed what the requestor asked to pull,
  including:
  - the tip of the branch being requested to be merged;
  - the branch description describing what the topic is about;
  - the contents of the annotated tag, when requesting to pull a tag.
* "git pull" learned to notice 'pull.rebase' configuration variable,
  which serves as a global fallback for setting 'branch.<name>.rebase'
  configuration variable per branch.
* "git tag" learned "--cleanup" option to control how the \ 
whitespaces
  and empty lines in tag message are cleaned up.
* "gitweb" learned to show side-by-side diff.