Brings performance optimizations and new features

Nov 29, 2016 23:42 GMT  ·  By

The Git project, through Jeff King, is proud to announce today, November 29, 2016, the release and general availability of the Git 2.11 open source project management software.

Git 2.11 arrives approximately three months after the massive Git 2.10 release, and it promises to offer the same level of performance optimizations and improvements, with the addition of a handful of new and useful features and the usual fixes for many of the bugs reported by users since the previous version.

"One of Git's goals has always been speed. While some of that comes from the overall design, there are a lot of opportunities to optimize the code itself. Almost every Git version ships with more optimizations, and 2.11 is no exception. Let's take a closer look at a few of the larger examples," reads today's announcement.

Highlights of Git 2.11

Prominent new features of Git 2.11 include the ability to print longer abbreviated SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) names, along with the implementation of new tools for handling obscure short SHA-1s, faster accessing of delta chains in the object database, thus adding a layer of performance to most, if not all common operations.

Git 2.11 also introduces multiple performance optimizations to object lookups, especially when dealing with multiple packfiles, makes the calculation of "patch IDs" used by the "git rebase" command a lot faster than before, and implements a more complex protocol capable of filtering numerous files with a single process.

Last but not least Git 2.11 comes with an improved diff algorithm that's similar to the one promoted as part of the Git 2.9 release, but capable of covering more cases, the ability to recognize negative parent-number selectors, and support for storing Git passwords thanks to a new libsecret-based credential helper in contrib/.

The "git diff" command was updated to support the "--submodule=diff" parameter, a new machine-readable output format was injected into "git status" command, and more of Git's shell scripts have been converted to C programs. You can download the Git 2.11.0 source archive right now from our website.