Git is a program for software and project developers, among others, with which management and version control over data and source code can be performed. The program can be seen as a competitor to Subversion or Mercurial. It has, among other things, complete branching and mergingfunctions and is released under the gpl version 2. For an overview of comparisons between Git and other version control systems, see this page. The developers have released Git 2.14.3 with the following changes:

Version 2.14.3

• A helper function to read a single whole line into strbuf mistakenly triggered OOM error at EOF under certain conditions, which has been fixed.
• In addition to “cc: # cruft”, “cc: a@dd.re.ss # cruft” was taught to “git send-email” as a valid way to tell it that it needs to also send a carbon copy to in the trailer section.
• Fix regression to “gitk –bisect” by a recent update.
• Unlike “git commit-tree < file", "git commit-tree -F file" did not pass the contents of the file verbatim and instead completed an incomplete line at the end, if exists. The latter has been updated to match the behavior of the former.
• “git archive”, especially when used with pathspec, stored an empty directory in its output, even though Git itself never does so. This has been fixed.
• API error-proofing which happens to also squelch warnings from GCC.
• “git gc” tries to avoid running two instances at the same time by reading and writing pid/host from and to a lock file; it used to use an incorrect fscanf() format when reading, which has been corrected.
• The test linter has been taught that we do not like “echo -e”.
• Code cmp.std.c nitpick.
• “git describe –match” learned to take multiple patterns in v2.13 series, but the feature ignored the patterns after the first one and did not work at all. This has been fixed.
• “git cat-file –textconv” started segfaulting recently, which has been corrected.
• The built-in pattern to detect the “function header” for HTML did not match

  ..

  elements without any attributes, which has been fixed.

• “git mailinfo” was loose in decoding quoted printable and produced garbage when the two letters after the equal sign are not hexadecimal. This has been fixed.
• The documentation for ‘-X‘ for merges was misleadingly written to suggest that “-s theirs” exists, which is not the case.
• Spell the name of our system as “Git” in the output from request-pull script.
• Fixes for a handful memory access issues identified by valgrind.
• Backports a moral equivalent of 2015 fix to the poll emulation from the upstream gnulib to fix occasional breakages on HPE NonStop.
• In the “–format=…” option of the “git for-each-ref” command (and its friends, ie the listing mode of “git branch/tag”), “%(atom:)” (eg “%(refname:)”, “%(body:)” used to error out. Instead, treat them as if the colon and an empty string that follows it were not there.
• Users with “color.ui = always” in their configuration were broken by a recent change that made plumbing commands to pay attention to them as the patch created internally by “git add -p” were colored (heh) and made unusable. This has been fixed.
• “git branch -M ab” while on a branch that is completely unrelated to either branch a or branch b misbehaved when multiple worktree was in use. This has been fixed.
• “git fast-export” with -M/-C option issued “copy” instruction on a path that is simultaneously modified, which was incorrect.
• The checkpoint command “git fast-import” did not flush updates to refs and marks unless at least one object was created since the last checkpoint, which has been corrected, as these things can happen without any new object getting created.
• The scripts to drive TravisCI has been reorganized and then an optimization to avoid spending cycles on a branch whose tip is tagged has been implemented.
• “git fetch :” allows an object name on the side when the other side accepts such a request since Git v2.5, but the documentation was left stale.
• A regression in 2.11 that made the code to read the list of alternate object stores overrun the end of the string has been fixed.

Also contains various documentation updates and code clean-ups.