Version 2.8 of the open-source distributed version-control system Git has been released. The new edition provides a variety of new features, bugfixes and other improvements.
According to GitHub, the most notable new features include:
- Parallel fetches of submodules: “Using ‘git submodules,’ one Git repository can include other Git repositories as subdirectories. This can be a useful way to include libraries or other external dependencies into your main project. The top-level repository specifies which submodules it wants to include, and which version of each submodule,” wrote Jeff King, a Git team member, in a blog post. According to him, if users have multiple submodules, fetches can be time-consuming. The latest release allows users to fetch from multiple submodules in parallel.
- Don’t guess my identity: Instead of using one e-mail address for all of a user’s open-source projects, they can now tell Git what user name and e-mail they want to use before they commit.
- Convergences with Git for Windows: The Git team has been working on making Git as easy to work with on Windows as it is on Linux and OS X. The latest release includes Git commands rewritten in C; Windows-specific changes from the Git for Windows project; and the ability to accept both LF and CRLF line endings. “This continuing effort will make it easier to keep the functionality of Git in sync across platforms as new features are added,” King wrote.
- Security fixes: Git 2.8 addresses the vulnerability CVE-2016-2324. There have not been any reported exploits, but the vulnerability could execute arbitrary code when cloning a malicious repository, according to King.
Other features include the ability to turn off Git’s clean and smudge filters; the ability to see where a particular setting came from; the ability to easily diagnose end-of-line problems; the ability to see a remote repository’s default branch; and support for cloning via the rsync protocol has been dropped.
The full release notes are available here.
