Git 2.21 released with performance improvement, multi-pack indexes, enhanced repositories and more

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Yesterday, the team at GitHub released Git 2.21 with a new date format, improved performance and bug fixes from over 60 contributors.

What’s new in Git 2.21?

Performance and internal implementation

It is now possible to clean-up the code with optimization for the codepath that checks non-existence of loose objects. The “strncat()” function is now counted amongst the banned functions. This release comes with portability updates for the HPE NonStop platform. The loose object cache used for optimizing existence look-up has also been updated. The flaky tests can now be repeatedly run under load with the “–stress” option.

Human-readable dates with –date=human

This release comes with git log that displays the date for each authored commit. In this release, the timestamps will be displayed in Git’s “default” format (for example, “Tue Feb 12 09:00:33 2019 -0800”). Although Git 2.21 comes with a new date format –date=human which makes it possible to frequently switch between the human and machine-readable formats while putting together a pipeline.

Multi-pack indexes

Git 2.21 can create a multi-pack index file instead of repacking and this index file acts as a listing of objects residing in multiple packs while removing the need to perform expensive repacks.

Delta reuse with bitmaps

Git now comes with bitmaps and gives an optional on-disk data structure to record the sets of objects “reachable” from each commit. On the availability of this data, users can query it to quickly determine whether the client has a base object. This would result in server generating smaller packs that are produced more quickly for a faster experience.

Enhanced repositories

In Git 2.21, the repositories can now enumerate alternate tips, and make the corresponding transaction much faster.

Major Fixes

The corner cases in merge-recursive have been fixed.
The Refspecs configured with “git -c var=val clone” which did not propagate to the resulting repository, have now been corrected.
Now there is no need of configured username/email under user.useConfigOnly for creating commits.
In this release, the http-backend CGI process now cleans up the child processes.

Users seem to be excited about this release. One of the comments on HackerNews reads, “Few Detecting files that differ only in case being cloned onto a case-insensitive file system is a great feature.”

To know more about this news, check out the release notes.