14 DAY TRIAL // Git, the open-source and cross-platform distributed version control system, has been updated to version 2.8.4, a maintenance release that adds assorted bugfixes and new features to the current stable 2.8 branch of the software.
Git 2.8.4 is the fourth point release in the Git 2.8 stable series, released three weeks after the third maintenance build. Git 2.8 is a major update that everyone should use, as it brought many exciting new features, such as parallel fetch of submodules, the ability to tell Git not to guess your identity, as well as support for turning off Git's smudge and clean filters.
Release highlights of Git 2.8.4 include updated documentation for the "git merge --verify-signatures" command to reflect the fact that only the commit's signature is being verified, support for hide .git and files marked with a dot in front of them as hidden on Microsoft Windows operating systems, and the ability for the "git fsck" command to catch NUL bytes in a commit object and report them as possible errors.
Among other interesting changes, we can mention that the "git submodule deinit" command will now suggest users to use "submodule deinit --all" instead of "git submodule deinit ." for de-initialising submodules. Then, unmerged paths can now be managed by the "git difftool" command in dir-diff mode, and the "git describe --contains" command has been updated to favor using the tag with the oldest tagger date.
"'git describe --contains' often made a hard-to-justify choice of tag to give name to a given commit, because it tried to come up with a name with smallest number of hops from a tag, causing an old commit whose close descendant that is recently tagged were not described with respect to an old tag but with a newer tag," reads the internal changelog.
Git remains the most widely used source code management system today
Git is currently used by over 12 million developers from all over the world, and it is considered the most widely used source code management system today. Git is cross-platform and open-source, and the latest version, Git 2.8.4, is available for download right now via our website for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
The popular GitHub project hosting website uses the Git distributed revision control system to provide developers with a user-friendly and powerful development environment. Git was created more than a decade ago by some of the most prominent Linux kernel developers, including Linus Torvalds. Don't hesitate to take a look at the changelog below to see what's new in Git 2.8.4.