Git 2.46-rc0 Continues Preparations For Switching To SHA256 By Default WIth Git 3.0

Git 2.46-rc0 was published on Friday as the first tagged development release on the trek toward Git 2.46.

Recent Git releases have seen a lot of work around preparations for switching to SHA256 hashes rather than the increasingly less secure SHA1 hashes. There has been recent SHA1 / SHA256 interoperability work and other improvements with Git's SHA256 use considered stable since last year but for Git 2.xx releases SHA1 is remaining the default.

With the new Git 2.46 series, the documentation was updated to affirm that SHA256 will be the default with Git 3.0. Yes, SHA256 will become the default object format over SHA1 with Git 3.0. But there is no plans on deprecating the SHA1 format support at this time for those wanting to continue using it instead.

Git 2.46-rc0 is also no longer setting SHA1 as the default object hash type when initializing a repository. That initial setup for SHA1 ultimately gets overrode by most Git commands during the directory setup process, but removing this initial hard-coded SHA1 setup call will hopefully uncover any other areas that aren't prepared for the SHA256 migration.

Git 2.46 is also bringing small additions to various CLI sub-commands, a new option to migrate a repository that uses the files backend for its ref storage to using the reftable backend, various performance improvements, and dozens of bug fixes.

More details on the new Git 2.46-rc0 release via Friday's announcement.