14 DAY TRIAL // Git 2.8 has just been released today, March 28, 2016, and we have to admit that it comes as a huge surprise to us all here at Softpedia, especially because the project's website has not yet been updated to reflect this.
We've spotted the Git 2.8 release with the help of our friends from unixstickers, and we've decided to write an article and tell you all about the new features that have been implemented. But if you don't have the time to read, you can download the Git 2.8 sources right now via our website.
"The open source Git project has just released Git 2.8.0, featuring a variety of features, bugfixes, and other improvements from over 70 contributors," says Jeff King of GitHub in today's release announcement. "Check out the full release notes for the complete list."
Prominent features of Git 2.8 include parallel fetches of submodules, which allows for the inclusion of other Git repositories in a single Git repo when using the "git submodules"command, support for turning off Git's smudge and clean filters, and the support for cloning repos through the rsync protocol has been removed.
Convergence with Git for Windows
The Git for Windows build has received a lot of attention in Git 2.8, and it looks like it's now as comfortable to use as it is on the GNU/Linux and Mac OS X platforms. Also, it is now possible to tell Git not to guess your identity, which, instead, forces you to add a user.name and user.email before doing any commits.
Other interesting changes in Git 2.8 include the ability to use the "git config --show-origin" command to view where a certain setting came from, along with the ability to use the "git ls-files --eol FILENAME" command to help diagnose end-of-line problems in a file. Moreover, there's also support for the "git ls-remote" command to tell you the default branch of a remote repo.