A small release that fixes issues and updates documentation

Jun 17, 2015 03:31 GMT  ·  By

The Git development team was happy to announce on June 16 the immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance release for Git 2.4, the stable branch of the widely used open-source distributed version control system.

According to the changelog, which has been attached at the end of the article for reference, Git 2.4.4 is a pretty small release that fixes no more than seven issues reported by users since the previous version of the software, and updates the German language localization.

It appears that Git 2.4.4 finally fixes a memory leak in the bitmap testing code (this is the second attempt to fix the leak), addresses an issue with the "git clean pathspec..." command, which will no longer complain about paths that are outside a certain pathspec, and fixes the "git stash something --help" command, which makes it easier for users to run something like "git stash drop --help."

Moreover, a dead-lock has been patched in the communication between the web server and the http_backend process, which occurred when attempting to relay a huge ref negotiation request. Also, the developers added some information that clarifies the relationship between the "log --format=raw" and "log --raw" commands.

The clean/smudge interface has received some improvements

Furthermore, Git 2.4.4 improves the clean/smudge interface for filtering operations, especially when dealing with empty contents. "It can be argued that a filter that produces anything but empty for an empty input is nonsense, but if the user wants to do strange things, then why not?" reads the announcement.

Last but not least, a couple of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) extensions are now being used for catching programmer mistakes to feed a pointer instead of an array to the ARRAY_SIZE() macro function. Some typos have been fixed as well, the documentation has been updated, and the code has been cleaned up a little. Download Git 2.4.4 right now from Softpedia.

Git 2.4.4 Changelog