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.
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:
In total, more than 125 people helped this way.
Former members of the editor team helped a lot, too:
A small number of people have also helped us by contributing to our scripts to automate parts of the edition and publication process:
A number of people helped by accepting to be interviewed in our “Developer Spotlight” or “Community Spotlight” sections. Thanks to them, too:
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:
Average per edition:
Text Statistics:
Average per article:
Total words per section:
Among those long articles, 16 articles were written by people outside the editor team. Big thanks to them! The top 3 is:
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:
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:
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.
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.
Various
Light reading
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).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 on a detailed example (in Perl).jenkins-plugin-cli from Plugin Installation Manager Tool for Jenkins.
.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.
You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.
000000,
by manipulating the commit date or message.Easy watching
Git tools and sites
git-who as a sort of git blame but for file trees rather than individual files.
Written in Go under MIT license.git (core) architecture and Lucene for indexing.
Written in Clojure, uses MIT license.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.