Git 2.26 Released

By Jack Wallen

Git 2.26 has been released and includes a far more efficient transport protocol.

If you’re a Linux admin, chances are you either program yourself or you work with programmers who help to make your job easier. With that in mind, Git is probably on the forefront of your work environment. To that end, you’ll be happy to know the latest release of the open source version control system includes some exciting new features.

Standing on top of that feature list is that Git protocol version 2 has now become the default for Git. This is important because the original protocol wasn’t nearly efficient enough for large projects. With V1, the Git server would list all branches, tags, and other repository references before a client could send anything. If a repository was large, megabytes of information had to be sent, even if only a small piece of information was requested.
Protocol V2 automatically starts with the client request, and provides the means for a client to inform the server which reference it’s interested in. So if a client requests a single branch, that’s the only information the client will receive. Switching from Transport Protocol V1 to V2 means Git will be significantly more efficient when working with large projects.
Other exciting features include:

Improved fsmonitor-watchman hook, which will avoid race conditions found in the previous version.
Lifting of the restriction on using threaded grep.
Lower memory footprint results in better performance for the git name-rev function.
CLI coloring now has brighter color variant options for the included seven colors.
Numerous bug fixes.

For more information, read the official announcement from Git.