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Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Git 2.0

The real "Git 2.0" is finally out.

From the point of view of end users who are totally new to Git, this release will give them the defaults that are vastly improved compared to the older versions, but at the same time, for existing users, this release is designed to be as low-impact as possible, as long as they have been following recent releases along (instead of sticking to age-old releases like 1.7.x series). Some may even say, without remembering why it was a big deal to bring these new default behaviours to help new users, that the new release does not offer anything exciting—and that is exactly what we want to hear from existing users. In recent releases for the past year or so, we have added knobs to allow users to enable these new defaults before 2.0 happens, and added warnings to let users know when they perform an operation whose outcome will be different between 1.x series and 2.0 release. The existing users are hopefully very well prepared by now, and "Git 2.0" is designed to be the final "flipping the default" step.

We had to delay the final release by a week or so because we found a few problems  in earlier release candidates (request-pull had a regression that stopped it from showing the "tags/" prefix in "Please pull tags/frotz" when the user asked to compose a request for 'frotz' to be pulled; a code path in git-gui to support ancient versions of Git incorrectly triggered for Git 2.0), which we had to fix in an extra unplanned release candidate.

Hopefully the next cycle will become shorter, as topics that have been cooking on the 'next' branch had extra time to mature, so it all evens out in the end ;-).

Have fun.