Git 2.28-rc1 Released - Continues The Transition Towards SHA256 Plus Moving Off "Master"

Git 2.28-rc1 was released on Friday in stepping towards the next feature release for this widely-used, distributed revision control system.

Git 2.28 has continued work on their plans to ultimately transition from SHA1 to SHA256 for hashes. To better secure Git repositories against possible SHA1 collisions, Git 2.28 continues making the necessary preparations towards using SHA256. Git 2.28 doesn't put the effort over the finish line but just another step forward in the big task -- including with this release working on some of the handling around its CVS/SVN interface.

When it comes to moving Git off "master" as the default name of the main code branch, Git 2.28 has additional work in this area too. The name of the primary branch in existing repositories and the default name for newly-created repositories is made configurable with Git 2.28. As said by Git maintainer Junio Hamano, "so that we can eventually wean ourselves off of the hardcoded 'master'."

Besides continued SHA256 work and more easily supporting main branches rather than "master" branches, Git 2.28 also has work on different code optimizations / performance improvements, command line completion improvements, and a fix for another git fsck corner case not being handled, among many other fixes and minor improvements.

More details on Git 2.28-rc1 via the mailing list announcement.