Git Rev News

Git Rev News: Edition 121 (March 31st, 2025)

Welcome to the 121st edition of Git Rev News, a digest of all things Git. For our goals, the archives, the way we work, and how to contribute or to subscribe, see the Git Rev News page on git.github.io.

This edition covers what happened during the months of February and March 2025.

Discussions

General

10 years of Git Rev News

Git Rev News started 10 years ago with edition 1 published on March 25, 2015, and then one edition per month.

To celebrate, let’s look at some stats that we have gathered about these first 120 editions.
- First we would like to thank all those who helped us so far.
  
  This includes those who helped with ideas, links, PRs, small corrections, letting us know about a Git related software release, and even sometimes full articles without being part of our editor team. Here is the top 12 along with the number of editions they helped us with, according to our “Credits” section, and the number of commits they contributed:
  - Johannes Schindelin: 29 editions and 71 commits
  - Bruno Brito: 25 editions and 36 commits
  - Luca Milanesio: 19 editions and 23 commits
  - Štěpán Němec: 18 editions and 22 commits
  - Junio Hamano: 13 editions and 22 commits
  - Philip Oakley: 10 editions and 10 commits
  - Elijah Newren: 10 editions and 9 commits
  - Andrew Ardill: 8 editions and 15 commits
  - David Pursehouse: 8 editions and 12 commits
  - Jeff King: 8 editions and 5 commits
  - Matthieu Moy: 6 editions and 14 commits
  - Lars Schneider: 6 editions and 14 commits
  In total, more than 125 people helped this way.
  
  Former members of the editor team helped a lot, too:
  - Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen: 33 editions and 135 commits
  - Gabriel Alcaras: 22 editions and 7 commits
  - Nicola Paolucci: 16 editions and 5 commits
  A small number of people have also helped us by contributing to our scripts to automate parts of the edition and publication process:
  - Gabriel Alcaras: 9 commits
  - David Aguilar: 3 commits
  - Mirth Hickford: 2 commits
- A number of people helped by accepting to be interviewed in our “Developer Spotlight” or “Community Spotlight” sections. Thanks to them, too:
  - Total interviews: 72
  - Unique interviewees: 70
  - Repeat interviews: 2 (David Aguilar and Eric Sunshine have been interviewed twice)
  - Developer interviews: 70
  - Community interviews: 2
- Most of the long articles are in a “Discussions” section and in one of its subsections: “General”, “Reviews” or “Support”. Here are some related stats:
  
  Total over all the editions:
  - Discussions articles: 254
  - General articles: 106
  - Reviews articles: 79
  - Support articles: 69
  Average per edition:
  - Discussions: 2.12
  - General: 0.88
  - Reviews: 0.66
  - Support: 0.57
  Text Statistics:
  - Total words: 100,434
  - Total lines: 14,090
  - Total paragraphs: 3,097
  Average per article:
  - Words: 395.4
  - Lines: 55.5
  - Paragraphs: 12.2
  Total words per section:
  - General: 29,220 words
  - Reviews: 35,912 words
  - Support: 35,302 words
- Among those long articles, 16 articles were written by people outside the editor team. Big thanks to them! The top 3 is:
  - Junio Hamano: 4
  - Matthieu Moy: 3
  - Jacob Keller: 2
  The following people wrote one article each:
  
  Andrew Ardill, Elijah Newren, Eric S. Raymond, Eric Sunshine, Jiang Xin, Lars Schneider.
  
  One article was also written collaboratively by the following students:
  
  François Beutin, Jordan De Gea, William Duclot, Samuel Groot, Erwan Mathonière, Antoine Queru, Simon Rabourg and Tom Russello.
  
  These articles were mostly written towards the first years of Git Rev News:
  - 2015: 8 articles
  - 2016: 2 articles
  - 2018: 2 articles
  - 2019: 1 article
  - 2020: 3 articles
- There were 2298 entries in the “Other News” section, which gathers links to various news, articles, sites, tools, and sometimes media about Git (or related to Git).
  
  Those entries include:
  - 1090 entries in “Light reading” over 114 editions with 1777 links; around 13.76% of entries mention previous editions.
  - 691 entries in “Git tools and sites” over 118 editions with 1270 links; around 11.72% of entries mention previous editions.
  - 411 entries in “Various” over 110 editions with 635 links; around 7.06% of entries mention previous editions.
  - 20 entries in “Events” over 12 editions with 39 links
  - 15 entries in “Easy watching” over 12 editions with 31 links; of those, 3 entries mention previous editions.
  There were quite a few one-off names of sub-lists, like “Slightly heavier reading”, “April Fool’s”, “Listening and watching”. The template with standardized names was not present in the 1st edition, but was created later.
Git participated in the December 2024 Outreachy round

All the Outreachy interns have successfully completed their internship:
- Seyi Kuforiji worked on the “Convert unit tests to use the clar testing framework” project, mentored by Patrick Steinhardt and Phillip Wood. See his completion email and his retrospect blog post.
- Usman Akinyemi worked on the “Finish adding a ‘os-version’ capability to Git protocol v2” project, mentored by Christian Couder. See his completion blog post.

Developer Spotlight: Peter Krefting

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Peter Krefting and I am a software engineer. Hailing from Sweden, I moved to Norway for my first job, at Opera Software, mostly working on internals such as Unicode support and internal libraries. I ended up staying in Norway and am currently working for a small company providing monitoring equipment for digital TV.
What are you doing on the Git project these days, and why?

My answers to these two are the same, I am the maintainer of the Swedish translation of Git. I like having software running in my own language, and sometimes you have to take matters in your own hands.
If you could get a team of expert developers to work full time on something in Git for a full year, what would it be?

I think git gui and gitk could need some extra love, these are my daily drivers, in addition to the command line.
Is there something that developers could do to ease the life of translators?

My main gripe is using library function names as verbs, like cannot fsync. That’s hard to read even in the original language, even for a C developer like myself.
What is your favorite Git-related tool/library, outside of Git itself?

I like simple and clean interfaces, so using cgit to visualize history on a web server is very nice.
What is your toolbox for interacting with the mailing list and for development of Git?

I mostly just read the mailing list, and only a small percentage of the posts to it; the localization is handled through GitHub pull requests, so that’s where that work happens. The few patches I have sent to the mailing list have been very manual, using git format-patch and the Alpine mail client.
What is your advice for people who want to start Git development? Where and how should they start?

Find some small part you want to improve, and work on that. Git is a fairly complex piece of software, implemented in several different languages, making it hard to get an overview. I most definitely do not have that, even after having read (and translated) most of the user-visible strings.

Other News

Various

What’s new in Git 2.49.0? by Toon Claes on GitLab Blog. This blog post mentions, among other things, improved performance thanks to zlib-ng, a new name-hashing algorithm, and git-backfill.
Highlights from Git 2.49 by Taylor Blau on GitHub Blog. Mentioned items include faster packing with name-hash v2, backfilling historical blobs in partial clones, building Git with zlib-ng, and the libgit-sys and libgit Rust crates.

Light reading

Going down the rabbit hole of Git’s new bundle-uri by Scott Chacon on GitButler blog.
The bundle-uri was mentioned in passing in Git Rev News Edition #95 (in “Developer Spotlight”) and in Edition #104 (in “Git tools and sites”, when mentioning git-bundle-server).
No Longer My Favorite Git Commit by Michael Lynch on his blog, talks about how one could improve the commit message described in David Thompson’s “My favourite Git commit” - which was mentioned in Git Rev News Edition #57 and #108.
- The article mentions the How to Write Useful Commit Messages guide by Michael Lynch, one of the sample chapters for his prospective book, “Refactoring English: Effective writing for software developers”.
- Another post by Michael Lynch, How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You, was mentioned in Git Rev News Edition #70.
19000 curl commits by Daniel Stenberg on his blog, presenting some statistics about those commits.
Why fastDOOM is fast by Fabien Sanglard, examines FastDOOM performance evolution over time, doing some nice Git archeology.
Personal Agency With Git Time Logging by Doug Bridgens on doocot blog. The commit-msg and pre-push hooks from git-time-hooks are used to measure time spans from creating a new branch to merging that branch.
git bisect … by Mohammad Sajid Anwar (MANWAR) on The Weekly Challenge blog. The blog post shows how to use git bisect on a detailed example (in Perl).
Python monorepo with uv and pex by Christoph Pröschel on his blog. The article discusses the benefits of a lightweight solution built with regular Python tooling over, for example, the Pants build tool, because it was easier to justify its adoption for the rest of the team.
- You can find a definition of “monorepo” and a list of various tools on the Monorepo.tools site, which was first mentioned in Git Rev News Edition #84.
Gerrit Code Review: A How-To Guide for new users! by Daniele Sassoli on GerritForge Blog. See also:
- How GitHub taught the world code review the wrong way by Daniele Sassoli (2024) on his Medium-based blog.
- Pull requests / Collaborate with pull requests / Getting started / Helping others review your changes on GitHub Docs.
TIL: Hugo’s GitInfo by Dionysis Grigoropoulos, about the GitInfo method of Hugo, the static site generator in Go. The method returns Git information related to the last commit of the given page.
GitHub meets GitLab by Mohammad Sajid Anwar (MANWAR) on The Weekly Challenge blog, about the terminology differences between GitHub and GitLab (part of the learning process to pick up GitLab).
Comparing Git Mirror Options: by Lloyd Atkinson on his blog. The tools considered include gitweb, cgit, and Forgejo; the last option (Forgejo) was ultimately selected.
Migrating git.adyxax.org from gitolite and cgit to Forgejo: How I am deploying Forgejo with Ansible. By Julien (Adyxax) Dessaux on his blog.
Learn Git through Gamification – A Visual Guide to Key Version Control Concepts by Jacob Stopak on freeCodeCamp.
4 reasons you need to run a Git server on your NAS (even if you’re not a developer) by Adam Conway on XDA Developers.
Manage DNS Records with GitHub Actions and DNSControl by John Wq on [runtimeerror] blog.
WSL SSH agent and Git by Patrik Trefil (2024) on his blog. This article describes how you can avoid the hassle of copying and pasting your SSH passphrase every time you want to connect to a machine via ssh.
Accessing git Servers Over Another Port When 22 is Blocked and Cloning Hangs Waiting for Connection by Jayson Salazar Rodriguez (2024) on his site.
Automatic Versioning with Xcode and Git by Rat Troupe on Reiterations blog (2024).
Version controlling Jenkins config by Kaushal Modi (2022) on A Scripter’s Notes; mentions jenkins-plugin-cli from Plugin Installation Manager Tool for Jenkins.
- Compare How to use the Jenkins Git Plugin: Tips and tricks by Cameron McKenzie from Git Rev News Edition #44, about Git | Jenkins Plugin.
Using Git Delta with Magit by Kaushal Modi (2022) on A Scripter’s Notes.
- Delta is a highly configurable command line utility that makes the Git diffs look better, while also syntax-highlighting the code in the diffs. First mentioned in Git Rev News Edition #86.
- Magit is a popular Emacs interface to Git, first mentioned (in passing) in Git Rev News Edition #6.
How to Proxy Git Connections: using socat to …Git… through a corporate firewall by Bryan Brattlof (2022) on his blog.
Git aliases supporting main and master: How to make your aliases agnostic to the default branch by Philipe Fatio (2022) on his blog.
Keeping ‘live‘ dotfiles in a Git repo by creating a repository directory named .dotfiles/ rather than .git/ via the --git-dir Git wrapper option. From https://probablerobot.net/ (2021).
On mainline merges and fast forwards by aoeuo (2008) on the Blogger-based DVCS Comparison blog. Compares Bazaar with Git and Mercurial.
GPLv2 is not impressed by git by Thomas Huehn on his Bear-powered blog, a short musing about the following phrase from the license:

You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.
I found commit 0 (or rather a commit whose SHA-1 identifier begins with 0000000), by Kissaki on the programming.dev Lemmy instance.
Lemmy is a self-hosted, federated social link aggregation and discussion forum, somewhat similar to Reddit.
- Note that there are tools like git-vain and git-vanity-sha, most recently listed in Git Rev News Edition #103, which can be used to make the SHA-1 hash of a commit start with a specific pattern, like 000000, by manipulating the commit date or message.

Easy watching

What Git Clone REALLY Does (and why it matters) on The Modern Coder YouTube channel, 3:16 minutes long. It’s made by @JackLot who created the LearnGit.io resource, which site was mentioned in Git Rev News Edition #108.
Git Interview Part 1: Easy | Ep. 8 Bits and Booze [29:09] and
Git Interview Part 2: Hard | Ep. 9 Bits and Booze [17:45]
on the GitButler YouTube channel. Join Nico as he (mock) interviews Scott [Chacon] about Git.

Git tools and sites

git-who is a command-line tool for finding the people responsible for entire components or subsystems in a codebase. You can think of git-who as a sort of git blame but for file trees rather than individual files. Written in Go under MIT license.
chrondb (repo) is a chronological key/value database, where storing data is based on database-shaped git (core) architecture and Lucene for indexing. Written in Clojure, uses MIT license.
Calendar.txt is a solution to keep your calendar in a plain text file. One of its advantages is that it is versionable: because it’s plain text, you can keep it in Git. You can also easily take diffs of calendar files, as it’s one day one line.
- See also Todo.txt to keep your TODO list in a plain text file, and tools like Taskwarrior and Plain Text Accounting (PTA).
YSK there are open-source (gamified) tutorials to learn git provides a list of some tutorials and interactive learning tools, including:
- Oh My Git!, an open source game about learning Git, first mentioned in Git Rev News Edition #72.
- Learn Git Branching, visual and interactive way to learn Git on the web, first mentioned in Git Rev News Edition #30.
- Git Gud: Master Git Through Play, a modern website to learn Git commands and concepts through an interactive game.
- Git+ Coach, a free education app designed to help users learn Git and its commands. Written in Kotlin, for Android.
- Git-it is a desktop (Mac, Windows and Linux) Electron app that teaches you how to use Git and GitHub on the command line. First mentioned in Git Rev News Edition #7.
BeanHub is a modern accounting book app based on the most popular open source version control system Git and the text-based double entry accounting book software Beancount. Mostly open-sourced. See also the following posts by Fang-Pen Lin:

Releases

Git 2.49.0, 2.49.0-rc2, 2.49.0-rc1
Git for Windows 2.49.0(1), 2.49.0-rc2(1), 2.49.0-rc1(1)
Gerrit Code Review 3.10.5, 3.11.2, 3.9.10
GitLab 17.10.1, 17.9.3, 17.8.6, 17.10, 17.9.2, 17.8.5, 17.7.7
GitHub Enterprise 3.16.1, 3.15.5, 3.14.10, 3.13.13, 3.12.17, 3.16.0, 3.15.4, 3.14.9, 3.13.12, 3.12.16
GitKraken 11.0.0, 10.8.0
GitHub Desktop 3.4.18
GitButler 0.14.14, 0.14.13
git-credential-azure 0.3.1
git-credential-oauth 0.15.0
Tower for Mac 12.6
Tower for Windows 9.0 (Release blog post)

Credits

This edition of Git Rev News was curated by Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>, Jakub Narębski <jnareb@gmail.com>, Markus Jansen <mja@jansen-preisler.de> and Kaartic Sivaraam <kaartic.sivaraam@gmail.com> with help from Peter Krefting, Bruno Brito, Daniele Sassoli, Toon Claes and Štěpán Němec.