The new Git version 2. 29 offers users of the open source tool for distributed version management the opportunity to test another object format that is on the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) 256 is based and is considered more secure against attacks as the common format based on SHA-1 – the newer object format with SHA – 256 receives experimental support with the current release. Also new are some shortlog tricks: So grouped git shortlog now commits not only according to the originator, but can also list co-authors.

Exclude references with negative refspecs Also, Git 2. 29 negative Refspecs. As a reminder, refspecs are elements that Git creates when cloning directories. The version management system can thus assign which content was located at which point and can, for example, correctly display the hierarchy of branches elsewhere. Until now, developers could only use these reference markers to determine which selection of references they wanted. With the negative Refspecs, references can be selectively excluded for the first time.

If a Refspec now begins with the character ^ , Git excludes the noted reference. So far, developers could have triggered this functionality with the following command: $ git fetch origin ‘refs / heads / *: refs / heads / *’ ^ refs / heads / ref-to-exclude . The result would be the same, the way there is now more elegantly accessible. The new negative Refspecs can obviously contain wildcards, but according to the blog entry it is not possible to give them a special target address.

To exclude a wildcard Refspec, users can use the command Insert ^ refs / heads / foo / . Negative Refspecs have another special feature: unlike positive Refspecs, they cannot refer to an individual object using the object ID. Negative Refspecs can also be used in the area of ​​configuration values.

New hash functions with SHA – 256 According to the blog announcement, the Git team plans and wants to introduce SHA – 256 as the standard in the future but continue to support SHA-1. For the upcoming switch to SHA – 256, the Git team has included a transition plan with the new release. In the future, it should also be possible to work with repositories in both formats, for which the software apparently calculates hashes in both formats for every object that users create in Git. So that users can edit repositories across formats if they contain objects with different formats, the version management system should then use a translation table from Git. References to older commits in the SHA-1 object format should remain valid, which Git wants to make possible by automatically converting the format using the translation table.

Since the previous version 2. 28 the calculation