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](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/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](http://neuro.debian.net/install_pkg.html?p=git-annex-standalone),
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](https://www.atlassian.com/git/articles/10-years-of-git/)
and see what you find!
