[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":813},["ShallowReactive",2],{"/en-us/blog/celebrating-gits-20th-anniversary-with-creator-linus-torvalds":3,"navigation-en-us":36,"banner-en-us":446,"footer-en-us":456,"blog-post-authors-en-us-Patrick Steinhardt":698,"blog-related-posts-en-us-celebrating-gits-20th-anniversary-with-creator-linus-torvalds":712,"blog-promotions-en-us":749,"next-steps-en-us":803},{"id":4,"title":5,"authorSlugs":6,"body":8,"categorySlug":9,"config":10,"content":14,"description":8,"extension":25,"isFeatured":12,"meta":26,"navigation":12,"path":27,"publishedDate":20,"seo":28,"stem":33,"tagSlugs":34,"__hash__":35},"blogPosts/en-us/blog/celebrating-gits-20th-anniversary-with-creator-linus-torvalds.yml","Celebrating Gits 20th Anniversary With Creator Linus Torvalds",[7],"patrick-steinhardt",null,"open-source",{"slug":11,"featured":12,"template":13},"celebrating-gits-20th-anniversary-with-creator-linus-torvalds",true,"BlogPost",{"title":15,"description":16,"authors":17,"heroImage":19,"date":20,"body":21,"category":9,"tags":22},"Celebrating Git's 20th anniversary with creator Linus Torvalds","Discover the origins of the open-source version control system, why he handed over the reins a few months in, and what he thinks about adding new programming languages to Git.",[18],"Patrick Steinhardt","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749662510/Blog/Hero%20Images/git-20-years-opt1.png","2025-04-07","The Git version control system was first released on April 7, 2005, by the father of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds. To mark the 20th anniversary of this important project that is nowadays used by almost every single developer, I interviewed Linus about the history of Git, why he handed over maintainership of Git, and what he considers to be its most important milestones.\n\n**In 2005, you were already the maintainer of the thriving Linux kernel. Why did you decide to start a new version control system?**\n\nSo, I got into it from really despising version control.\n\nI had used the traditional version control systems (CVS/RCS/SCCS) both as an end user (i.e., tracking open source projects like [GCC](https://gcc.gnu.org/)) and as a developer (we used CVS at Transmeta for everything) and absolutely hated the experience with a passion.\n\n\u003Cimg src=\"https://about.gitlab.com/images/blogimages/linustorvalds.png\" align=\"left\" width=\"200px\" style=\"padding-right: 20px; padding-bottom: 10px\"/>\n\nAnd yes, back then most projects that used CVS had probably moved to [SVN](https://subversion.apache.org/), but honestly, I always felt that SVN was just \"lipstick on a pig.\" It was just CVS in another form, with some UI improvements, but none of the fundamentals fixed, and a few new problems added.\n\nThe problems with CVS and its ilk are too many to even list, and, happily, they have largely become irrelevant and younger developers have probably never even had to deal with any of it. I absolutely refused to deal with it for the kernel, even though a few subsystems (notably the networking side) were actually using CVS to track their code back in the '90s.\n\nAnyway, back then I lived in the Bay Area, and Larry McVoy, who I knew from other projects (mainly [lmbench](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/sd96/full_papers/mcvoy.pdf)), had started BitMover, which had a new version control model called BitKeeper, or BK, for short.\n\nBK wasn't open source, but Larry liked open source projects and really felt that the lack of version control was holding the kernel back. He wasn't wrong, but the traditional source code managers (SCMs) really didn't work for me at all. Larry spent some time showing me and David Miller (networking maintainer and existing CVS user) what BitKeeper could do.\n\nBK wasn't perfect, and it was based on Source Code Control System (SCCS) like so many other traditional SCMs were, and thus had the same broken \"history per file\" model that everybody else had, and that causes huge and fundamental issues with file renaming and deletion.\n\nBut BK also wasn't just that \"lipstick\" thing. It may have used SCCS at a low level, but on a higher level it fixed some really fundamental things, and did proper distributed development, and had a real global – not per-file – history that made merging code from different trees actually work.\n\nWith CVS, creating branches and merging them was something you had to plan and discuss with people, and were major events. With BK, every repository was a branch. We take that for granted now, and Git obviously took it much further by having many branches *per* repository, but even the much more limited BK model was really a big deal at the time.\n\nAgain, BK wasn't perfect. As mentioned, it did do per-file history, which really is a big fundamental problem that makes renaming and file merging simply not work reliably, and inevitably causes chaos and pain (for CVS people, think Attic, shudder). And it had some scalability issues, too, but those took a while to become more than a bit problematic.\n\nBut the biggest problem with BK was the licensing, and while over the years (we used BK from 2002 to 2005) a lot of kernel maintainers did end up switching over to it, it was always a bit of a friction point. And that friction came to a head in late 2004, and the use of BK for the kernel basically became untenable a few months later.\n\nI was in the situation that for three years I'd finally used source control that worked, and it really had solved a lot of problems. There was no way I was going back to the days before source control, but in the years we'd been using BK, nothing better had really come out of the open source community.\n\nSure, people knew that CVS and SVN didn't work well, and there were projects that tried alternate approaches, but some of those approaches were even worse (basically amounting to \"fancy patch tracking\"), or had some good ideas but in the process making up some entirely new horrible design mistakes ([Monotone](https://www.monotone.ca/)).\n\nSo, I looked around for a while, and decided that I didn't have any options – I had to write my own.\n\nNow, technically, it actually did take only a few days to make the first version of Git, and hey, it's all there in the Git commit history. It's easy enough to see how it goes from pretty much zero to being usable enough that I started applying patches from others a week later (and being actively used for the kernel a few days after that).\n\nBut that ignores the fact that I had been *thinking* about the problem for a while by then. Writing code is easy. Getting a good design is what matters. So there was a fair amount of background to those few days that is pretty important, and that part doesn't show up in the history.\n\nAnd hey, that first version was very, very rough, and didn't do a lot that was to come later. But you can definitely already see much of the core design in those first few days.\n\n**Can you give us a short recount of the first days and weeks of how the Git project was started?**\n\nI had basically decided that I will stop kernel development until I had an alternative that worked for me. The main goals were to be distributed and high performance, and be something you could absolutely rely on to catch any corruption.\n\nBut I really do want to stress that I wasn't interested in SCMs, per se. I was interested in the end result, not in the process. So Git was never like the kernel for me: I do Linux because I think kernels are interesting - I did Git because I had to.\n\nWhich then directly segues into your next question.\n\n**You handed over the maintainership of Git to Junio Hamano after a couple of months, and Junio is still the maintainer. Why did you hand over maintainership and what made you pick Junio?**\n\nHanding over maintainership was not a hard choice. It was very much: \"The moment somebody else comes along that I can trust to keep it going, I'll go back to doing just the kernel.\"\n\nWhich is not to say that I just threw things over the wall and prayed for the best. I ended up maintaining Git for something like four months because I felt I needed to find somebody who would stick around, and had that hard-to-explain quality of \"GoodTaste\"(TM).\n\nJunio had been one of the very early people involved (he literally showed up the first week of development), but it's not like I just said, \"Tag, you're it.\"  It takes a while to see who sticks around, and who writes code and makes decisions that make sense.\n\nAnd I think Junio has been exemplary. I get much too much credit for the few months I spent on Git - particularly in light of the 20th anniversary. I'll take credit for getting the core design right, and getting the project started, but it really is Junio who has led the project (not to belittle the hundreds of other people involved, but still).\n\n**The initial version of the Mercurial version control system was released only 12 days after the initial version of Git, on April 19, 2005. Many people claim that Mercurial's user experience was superior over Git's, but nowadays Git is significantly more popular. Why do you think that Git has won over Mercurial?**\n\nOh, a big part of it is obviously just network effects, and SCMs have very strong network effects. It's why CVS survived as long as it did despite its limitations.\n\nSo, the fact that the kernel used Git (and then at some point it got to be very popular in the Ruby on Rails community, and then it took off everywhere).\n\nBut I really do think that the design of Git is superior. The core model is both very simple and very powerful, and I think that made it easier to translate into other environments. JGit was an early example of that, but you obviously have implementations like the MSgit virtual filesystem, etc.\n\nAnd while Git was famously somewhat hard to use early on, I really do think that some of that comes from having done things \"right,\" where people coming from other environments found Git non-intuitive because Git really did a few hard decisions that a traditional SCM person would never have done.\n\n**The Git project has not stood still since you handed maintainership over to Junio, and its community is always busy working on new features. What do you think the most important milestones were after you have left the project?**\n\nThat's really hard for me to say, mainly because I obviously made Git work for me, and so the things *I* use have worked from pretty much Day One. Just as an obvious example: Making Git work on Windows was obviously a huge step for other people, but it affected *me* not at all ;)\n\nThere's obviously all the infrastructure within Git itself to make it a lot easier to use, but I think most of the big milestones have all been around people taking the Git infrastructure and building things around it. Those often end up feeding back into Git features, of course, but, at the same time, the milestone is about something external.\n\nTo give an obvious example: All the big Git hosting sites were big milestones. Making Git be distributed was what made those so much easier to do, but the *milestone* was how then the hosting made it so easy for users to use Git for various projects.\n\n**If you had the capacity to work on Git full time again, would there be anything that you would like to implement?**\n\nAbsolutely not. Git did everything I really needed from very early on – my use is actually fairly limited, and I only really care about one project.\n\nAnd I say \"absolutely not\" because I refer you to that earlier answer: I was never really interested in SCMs at all to begin with. I think a large reason for why Git ended up being so different - mostly in good ways - from other SCMs was that I approached it more like I would a distributed journaling filesystem, not really a traditional SCM.\n\n**Is there any feature or design decision in Git that you have come to regret in retrospect?**\n\nDesign decisions? No. I still think the high-level design is just very good, and you can discuss various Git concepts without ever getting into the nitty-gritty complexity of actual implementation.\n\nAnd I think that's important in a project. You need a certain high-level design principle to guide the conceptual direction of a project.\n\nSometimes people take that too far, and think that the high-level design means that the implementation must then slavishly follow some core principle. And that's wrong, too – the *implementation* will have lots of nasty corner cases because reality is hard and people want odd things, but there needs to be some kind of top-level design that you can point to and reason about at a high level before you get your hands dirty with the nasty reality.\n\nAnd I think Git has a good balance of that. A very straightforward object store design (call them \"structured Merkle trees\" if you are a CS person, or you might just think of them as a \"content addressable storage\" if you are a filesystem person). That core design is there – but at the same time, it's realistically just a very tiny part of the actual code. Most of the *code* is about all the things you can do with the core design, but that basic clarity of design still gives the project some kind of high-level structure.\n\nIt's the same kind of high-level structure that Unix itself had, whether you said \"everything is a file\" or you were talking about process handling. There are a few \"concepts\" that drive the design, but then 99% of the code is about the ugly harsh details of what you build on top of that to make it all useful in the real world.\n\nI have two mantras in technology: \"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants\" (Newton) and \"Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration\" (Edison).\n\nBut talking about the 99% perspiration: While I am very happy with the big design, there are certainly various details that I would have done differently if I were to do Git today.\n\nBut honestly, they aren't that important. What's much more important is all the *good* details that have been done over the last two decades.\n\n**The Linux kernel has started to use Rust as a programming language for some of its subsystems. Do you think it makes sense to start using such newer programming languages like this in Git?**\n\nI suspect that when it comes to Git, there's less reason to try to mix languages, which is always somewhat painful.\n\nIn the kernel, the end result is one single kernel binary – even if much of it can be loaded dynamically as modules, it is still linked together into effectively one single binary.\n\nAnd that makes using multiple languages more complex. But, on the other hand, the kernel also has more reason to worry about memory safety and, thus, look at newer languages.\n\nIn Git, if somebody wants to write parts of it in Rust or another language, I suspect it makes much more sense to just go for a separate implementation rather than try to mix languages in one binary.\n\nMuch of the Git core ideas are simple enough that just having parallel implementations of the core likely isn't too painful, and then you can target particular problem spaces where a different language makes more sense.\n\nAnd we've seen that in Git already, of course: That's exactly what JGit is. The use of a different language was due to a different web-based environment where that language choice was much more natural.\n\nI know that there are already Rust implementations of some of the core Git functionality, and I think the situation is similar: I suspect they make more sense in specific situations than in some kind of overall \"let's convert things to Rust\" kind of way.\n\nSo for anybody who is interested in implementing things in Rust, I'd suggest looking for target areas where the advantages of Rust are more obvious. I don't think C has actually been all that problematic in the standard Git source base.\n\n**New version control systems are popping up every couple of years. Do you think that Git will stay relevant in the future?**\n\nI already mentioned the network effects in SCMs, and I think that means that to replace Git you have to be not just slightly better, you have to be enormously better. Or so compatible that you effectively are just a new implementation of Git.\n\nAnd I do think the SCM situation has changed – Git doesn't have the kinds of huge gaping fundamental problems that SCMs had before Git. So being \"enormously better\" is fairly hard.\n\nSo, yes, I would expect Git to stay relevant for the foreseeable future, with people working on improvements *around* Git rather than replacements.\n\n*Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.*\n\n> Take a [journey with us through Git's 20-year history](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/journey-through-gits-20-year-history/).\n\n## Learn more about Git\n\n- [What's new in Git 2.49.0?](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/whats-new-in-git-2-49-0/)  \n- [What’s new in Git 2.48.0?](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/whats-new-in-git-2-48-0/)  \n- [A beginner's guide to the Git reftable format](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/a-beginners-guide-to-the-git-reftable-format/)\n- [Git project](https://git-scm.com/)",[23,24],"open source","git","yml",{},"/en-us/blog/celebrating-gits-20th-anniversary-with-creator-linus-torvalds",{"title":15,"description":16,"ogTitle":15,"ogDescription":16,"noIndex":29,"ogImage":19,"ogUrl":30,"ogSiteName":31,"ogType":32,"canonicalUrls":30},false,"https://about.gitlab.com/blog/celebrating-gits-20th-anniversary-with-creator-linus-torvalds","https://about.gitlab.com","article","en-us/blog/celebrating-gits-20th-anniversary-with-creator-linus-torvalds",[9,24],"3cahLSy392Zvfwe86WHU94WfA0zlC5wDoqHfOopj2Q0",{"data":37},{"logo":38,"freeTrial":43,"sales":48,"login":53,"items":58,"search":366,"minimal":397,"duo":416,"switchNav":425,"pricingDeployment":436},{"config":39},{"href":40,"dataGaName":41,"dataGaLocation":42},"/","gitlab logo","header",{"text":44,"config":45},"Get free trial",{"href":46,"dataGaName":47,"dataGaLocation":42},"https://gitlab.com/-/trial_registrations/new?glm_source=about.gitlab.com&glm_content=default-saas-trial/","free trial",{"text":49,"config":50},"Talk to sales",{"href":51,"dataGaName":52,"dataGaLocation":42},"/sales/","sales",{"text":54,"config":55},"Sign in",{"href":56,"dataGaName":57,"dataGaLocation":42},"https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in/","sign in",[59,86,181,186,287,347],{"text":60,"config":61,"cards":63},"Platform",{"dataNavLevelOne":62},"platform",[64,70,78],{"title":60,"description":65,"link":66},"The intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps",{"text":67,"config":68},"Explore our Platform",{"href":69,"dataGaName":62,"dataGaLocation":42},"/platform/",{"title":71,"description":72,"link":73},"GitLab Duo Agent Platform","Agentic AI for the entire software lifecycle",{"text":74,"config":75},"Meet GitLab Duo",{"href":76,"dataGaName":77,"dataGaLocation":42},"/gitlab-duo-agent-platform/","gitlab duo agent platform",{"title":79,"description":80,"link":81},"Why GitLab","See the top reasons enterprises choose GitLab",{"text":82,"config":83},"Learn more",{"href":84,"dataGaName":85,"dataGaLocation":42},"/why-gitlab/","why gitlab",{"text":87,"left":12,"config":88,"link":90,"lists":94,"footer":163},"Product",{"dataNavLevelOne":89},"solutions",{"text":91,"config":92},"View all Solutions",{"href":93,"dataGaName":89,"dataGaLocation":42},"/solutions/",[95,119,142],{"title":96,"description":97,"link":98,"items":103},"Automation","CI/CD and automation to accelerate deployment",{"config":99},{"icon":100,"href":101,"dataGaName":102,"dataGaLocation":42},"AutomatedCodeAlt","/solutions/delivery-automation/","automated software delivery",[104,108,111,115],{"text":105,"config":106},"CI/CD",{"href":107,"dataGaLocation":42,"dataGaName":105},"/solutions/continuous-integration/",{"text":71,"config":109},{"href":76,"dataGaLocation":42,"dataGaName":110},"gitlab duo agent platform - product menu",{"text":112,"config":113},"Source Code Management",{"href":114,"dataGaLocation":42,"dataGaName":112},"/solutions/source-code-management/",{"text":116,"config":117},"Automated Software Delivery",{"href":101,"dataGaLocation":42,"dataGaName":118},"Automated software delivery",{"title":120,"description":121,"link":122,"items":127},"Security","Deliver code faster without compromising security",{"config":123},{"href":124,"dataGaName":125,"dataGaLocation":42,"icon":126},"/solutions/application-security-testing/","security and compliance","ShieldCheckLight",[128,132,137],{"text":129,"config":130},"Application Security Testing",{"href":124,"dataGaName":131,"dataGaLocation":42},"Application security testing",{"text":133,"config":134},"Software Supply Chain Security",{"href":135,"dataGaLocation":42,"dataGaName":136},"/solutions/supply-chain/","Software supply chain security",{"text":138,"config":139},"Software Compliance",{"href":140,"dataGaName":141,"dataGaLocation":42},"/solutions/software-compliance/","software compliance",{"title":143,"link":144,"items":149},"Measurement",{"config":145},{"icon":146,"href":147,"dataGaName":148,"dataGaLocation":42},"DigitalTransformation","/solutions/visibility-measurement/","visibility and measurement",[150,154,158],{"text":151,"config":152},"Visibility & Measurement",{"href":147,"dataGaLocation":42,"dataGaName":153},"Visibility and Measurement",{"text":155,"config":156},"Value Stream Management",{"href":157,"dataGaLocation":42,"dataGaName":155},"/solutions/value-stream-management/",{"text":159,"config":160},"Analytics & Insights",{"href":161,"dataGaLocation":42,"dataGaName":162},"/solutions/analytics-and-insights/","Analytics and insights",{"title":164,"items":165},"GitLab for",[166,171,176],{"text":167,"config":168},"Enterprise",{"href":169,"dataGaLocation":42,"dataGaName":170},"/enterprise/","enterprise",{"text":172,"config":173},"Small Business",{"href":174,"dataGaLocation":42,"dataGaName":175},"/small-business/","small business",{"text":177,"config":178},"Public Sector",{"href":179,"dataGaLocation":42,"dataGaName":180},"/solutions/public-sector/","public sector",{"text":182,"config":183},"Pricing",{"href":184,"dataGaName":185,"dataGaLocation":42,"dataNavLevelOne":185},"/pricing/","pricing",{"text":187,"config":188,"link":190,"lists":194,"feature":274},"Resources",{"dataNavLevelOne":189},"resources",{"text":191,"config":192},"View all resources",{"href":193,"dataGaName":189,"dataGaLocation":42},"/resources/",[195,228,246],{"title":196,"items":197},"Getting started",[198,203,208,213,218,223],{"text":199,"config":200},"Install",{"href":201,"dataGaName":202,"dataGaLocation":42},"/install/","install",{"text":204,"config":205},"Quick start guides",{"href":206,"dataGaName":207,"dataGaLocation":42},"/get-started/","quick setup checklists",{"text":209,"config":210},"Learn",{"href":211,"dataGaLocation":42,"dataGaName":212},"https://university.gitlab.com/","learn",{"text":214,"config":215},"Product documentation",{"href":216,"dataGaName":217,"dataGaLocation":42},"https://docs.gitlab.com/","product documentation",{"text":219,"config":220},"Best practice videos",{"href":221,"dataGaName":222,"dataGaLocation":42},"/getting-started-videos/","best practice videos",{"text":224,"config":225},"Integrations",{"href":226,"dataGaName":227,"dataGaLocation":42},"/integrations/","integrations",{"title":229,"items":230},"Discover",[231,236,241],{"text":232,"config":233},"Customer success stories",{"href":234,"dataGaName":235,"dataGaLocation":42},"/customers/","customer success stories",{"text":237,"config":238},"Blog",{"href":239,"dataGaName":240,"dataGaLocation":42},"/blog/","blog",{"text":242,"config":243},"Remote",{"href":244,"dataGaName":245,"dataGaLocation":42},"https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/all-remote/","remote",{"title":247,"items":248},"Connect",[249,254,259,264,269],{"text":250,"config":251},"GitLab Services",{"href":252,"dataGaName":253,"dataGaLocation":42},"/services/","services",{"text":255,"config":256},"Community",{"href":257,"dataGaName":258,"dataGaLocation":42},"/community/","community",{"text":260,"config":261},"Forum",{"href":262,"dataGaName":263,"dataGaLocation":42},"https://forum.gitlab.com/","forum",{"text":265,"config":266},"Events",{"href":267,"dataGaName":268,"dataGaLocation":42},"/events/","events",{"text":270,"config":271},"Partners",{"href":272,"dataGaName":273,"dataGaLocation":42},"/partners/","partners",{"backgroundColor":275,"textColor":276,"text":277,"image":278,"link":282},"#2f2a6b","#fff","Insights for the future of software development",{"altText":279,"config":280},"the source promo card",{"src":281},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1758208064/dzl0dbift9xdizyelkk4.svg",{"text":283,"config":284},"Read the latest",{"href":285,"dataGaName":286,"dataGaLocation":42},"/the-source/","the source",{"text":288,"config":289,"lists":291},"Company",{"dataNavLevelOne":290},"company",[292],{"items":293},[294,299,305,307,312,317,322,327,332,337,342],{"text":295,"config":296},"About",{"href":297,"dataGaName":298,"dataGaLocation":42},"/company/","about",{"text":300,"config":301,"footerGa":304},"Jobs",{"href":302,"dataGaName":303,"dataGaLocation":42},"/jobs/","jobs",{"dataGaName":303},{"text":265,"config":306},{"href":267,"dataGaName":268,"dataGaLocation":42},{"text":308,"config":309},"Leadership",{"href":310,"dataGaName":311,"dataGaLocation":42},"/company/team/e-group/","leadership",{"text":313,"config":314},"Team",{"href":315,"dataGaName":316,"dataGaLocation":42},"/company/team/","team",{"text":318,"config":319},"Handbook",{"href":320,"dataGaName":321,"dataGaLocation":42},"https://handbook.gitlab.com/","handbook",{"text":323,"config":324},"Investor relations",{"href":325,"dataGaName":326,"dataGaLocation":42},"https://ir.gitlab.com/","investor relations",{"text":328,"config":329},"Trust Center",{"href":330,"dataGaName":331,"dataGaLocation":42},"/security/","trust center",{"text":333,"config":334},"AI Transparency Center",{"href":335,"dataGaName":336,"dataGaLocation":42},"/ai-transparency-center/","ai transparency center",{"text":338,"config":339},"Newsletter",{"href":340,"dataGaName":341,"dataGaLocation":42},"/company/contact/#contact-forms","newsletter",{"text":343,"config":344},"Press",{"href":345,"dataGaName":346,"dataGaLocation":42},"/press/","press",{"text":348,"config":349,"lists":350},"Contact us",{"dataNavLevelOne":290},[351],{"items":352},[353,356,361],{"text":49,"config":354},{"href":51,"dataGaName":355,"dataGaLocation":42},"talk to sales",{"text":357,"config":358},"Support portal",{"href":359,"dataGaName":360,"dataGaLocation":42},"https://support.gitlab.com","support portal",{"text":362,"config":363},"Customer portal",{"href":364,"dataGaName":365,"dataGaLocation":42},"https://customers.gitlab.com/customers/sign_in/","customer portal",{"close":367,"login":368,"suggestions":375},"Close",{"text":369,"link":370},"To search repositories and projects, login to",{"text":371,"config":372},"gitlab.com",{"href":56,"dataGaName":373,"dataGaLocation":374},"search login","search",{"text":376,"default":377},"Suggestions",[378,380,384,386,390,394],{"text":71,"config":379},{"href":76,"dataGaName":71,"dataGaLocation":374},{"text":381,"config":382},"Code Suggestions (AI)",{"href":383,"dataGaName":381,"dataGaLocation":374},"/solutions/code-suggestions/",{"text":105,"config":385},{"href":107,"dataGaName":105,"dataGaLocation":374},{"text":387,"config":388},"GitLab on AWS",{"href":389,"dataGaName":387,"dataGaLocation":374},"/partners/technology-partners/aws/",{"text":391,"config":392},"GitLab on Google Cloud",{"href":393,"dataGaName":391,"dataGaLocation":374},"/partners/technology-partners/google-cloud-platform/",{"text":395,"config":396},"Why GitLab?",{"href":84,"dataGaName":395,"dataGaLocation":374},{"freeTrial":398,"mobileIcon":403,"desktopIcon":408,"secondaryButton":411},{"text":399,"config":400},"Start free trial",{"href":401,"dataGaName":47,"dataGaLocation":402},"https://gitlab.com/-/trials/new/","nav",{"altText":404,"config":405},"Gitlab Icon",{"src":406,"dataGaName":407,"dataGaLocation":402},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1758203874/jypbw1jx72aexsoohd7x.svg","gitlab icon",{"altText":404,"config":409},{"src":410,"dataGaName":407,"dataGaLocation":402},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1758203875/gs4c8p8opsgvflgkswz9.svg",{"text":412,"config":413},"Get Started",{"href":414,"dataGaName":415,"dataGaLocation":402},"https://gitlab.com/-/trial_registrations/new?glm_source=about.gitlab.com/get-started/","get started",{"freeTrial":417,"mobileIcon":421,"desktopIcon":423},{"text":418,"config":419},"Learn more about GitLab Duo",{"href":76,"dataGaName":420,"dataGaLocation":402},"gitlab duo",{"altText":404,"config":422},{"src":406,"dataGaName":407,"dataGaLocation":402},{"altText":404,"config":424},{"src":410,"dataGaName":407,"dataGaLocation":402},{"button":426,"mobileIcon":431,"desktopIcon":433},{"text":427,"config":428},"/switch",{"href":429,"dataGaName":430,"dataGaLocation":402},"#contact","switch",{"altText":404,"config":432},{"src":406,"dataGaName":407,"dataGaLocation":402},{"altText":404,"config":434},{"src":435,"dataGaName":407,"dataGaLocation":402},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1773335277/ohhpiuoxoldryzrnhfrh.png",{"freeTrial":437,"mobileIcon":442,"desktopIcon":444},{"text":438,"config":439},"Back to pricing",{"href":184,"dataGaName":440,"dataGaLocation":402,"icon":441},"back to pricing","GoBack",{"altText":404,"config":443},{"src":406,"dataGaName":407,"dataGaLocation":402},{"altText":404,"config":445},{"src":410,"dataGaName":407,"dataGaLocation":402},{"title":447,"button":448,"config":453},"See how agentic AI transforms software delivery",{"text":449,"config":450},"Watch GitLab Transcend now",{"href":451,"dataGaName":452,"dataGaLocation":42},"/events/transcend/virtual/","transcend event",{"layout":454,"icon":455,"disabled":12},"release","AiStar",{"data":457},{"text":458,"source":459,"edit":465,"contribute":470,"config":475,"items":480,"minimal":687},"Git is a trademark of Software Freedom Conservancy and our use of 'GitLab' is under license",{"text":460,"config":461},"View page source",{"href":462,"dataGaName":463,"dataGaLocation":464},"https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/digital-experience/about-gitlab-com/","page source","footer",{"text":466,"config":467},"Edit this page",{"href":468,"dataGaName":469,"dataGaLocation":464},"https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/digital-experience/about-gitlab-com/-/blob/main/content/","web ide",{"text":471,"config":472},"Please contribute",{"href":473,"dataGaName":474,"dataGaLocation":464},"https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/digital-experience/about-gitlab-com/-/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md/","please contribute",{"twitter":476,"facebook":477,"youtube":478,"linkedin":479},"https://twitter.com/gitlab","https://www.facebook.com/gitlab","https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnMGQ8QHMAnVIsI3xJrihhg","https://www.linkedin.com/company/gitlab-com",[481,528,582,626,653],{"title":182,"links":482,"subMenu":497},[483,487,492],{"text":484,"config":485},"View plans",{"href":184,"dataGaName":486,"dataGaLocation":464},"view plans",{"text":488,"config":489},"Why Premium?",{"href":490,"dataGaName":491,"dataGaLocation":464},"/pricing/premium/","why premium",{"text":493,"config":494},"Why Ultimate?",{"href":495,"dataGaName":496,"dataGaLocation":464},"/pricing/ultimate/","why ultimate",[498],{"title":499,"links":500},"Contact Us",[501,504,506,508,513,518,523],{"text":502,"config":503},"Contact sales",{"href":51,"dataGaName":52,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":357,"config":505},{"href":359,"dataGaName":360,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":362,"config":507},{"href":364,"dataGaName":365,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":509,"config":510},"Status",{"href":511,"dataGaName":512,"dataGaLocation":464},"https://status.gitlab.com/","status",{"text":514,"config":515},"Terms of use",{"href":516,"dataGaName":517,"dataGaLocation":464},"/terms/","terms of use",{"text":519,"config":520},"Privacy statement",{"href":521,"dataGaName":522,"dataGaLocation":464},"/privacy/","privacy statement",{"text":524,"config":525},"Cookie preferences",{"dataGaName":526,"dataGaLocation":464,"id":527,"isOneTrustButton":12},"cookie preferences","ot-sdk-btn",{"title":87,"links":529,"subMenu":538},[530,534],{"text":531,"config":532},"DevSecOps platform",{"href":69,"dataGaName":533,"dataGaLocation":464},"devsecops platform",{"text":535,"config":536},"AI-Assisted Development",{"href":76,"dataGaName":537,"dataGaLocation":464},"ai-assisted development",[539],{"title":540,"links":541},"Topics",[542,547,552,557,562,567,572,577],{"text":543,"config":544},"CICD",{"href":545,"dataGaName":546,"dataGaLocation":464},"/topics/ci-cd/","cicd",{"text":548,"config":549},"GitOps",{"href":550,"dataGaName":551,"dataGaLocation":464},"/topics/gitops/","gitops",{"text":553,"config":554},"DevOps",{"href":555,"dataGaName":556,"dataGaLocation":464},"/topics/devops/","devops",{"text":558,"config":559},"Version Control",{"href":560,"dataGaName":561,"dataGaLocation":464},"/topics/version-control/","version control",{"text":563,"config":564},"DevSecOps",{"href":565,"dataGaName":566,"dataGaLocation":464},"/topics/devsecops/","devsecops",{"text":568,"config":569},"Cloud Native",{"href":570,"dataGaName":571,"dataGaLocation":464},"/topics/cloud-native/","cloud native",{"text":573,"config":574},"AI for Coding",{"href":575,"dataGaName":576,"dataGaLocation":464},"/topics/devops/ai-for-coding/","ai for coding",{"text":578,"config":579},"Agentic AI",{"href":580,"dataGaName":581,"dataGaLocation":464},"/topics/agentic-ai/","agentic ai",{"title":583,"links":584},"Solutions",[585,587,589,594,598,601,605,608,610,613,616,621],{"text":129,"config":586},{"href":124,"dataGaName":129,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":118,"config":588},{"href":101,"dataGaName":102,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":590,"config":591},"Agile development",{"href":592,"dataGaName":593,"dataGaLocation":464},"/solutions/agile-delivery/","agile delivery",{"text":595,"config":596},"SCM",{"href":114,"dataGaName":597,"dataGaLocation":464},"source code management",{"text":543,"config":599},{"href":107,"dataGaName":600,"dataGaLocation":464},"continuous integration & delivery",{"text":602,"config":603},"Value stream management",{"href":157,"dataGaName":604,"dataGaLocation":464},"value stream management",{"text":548,"config":606},{"href":607,"dataGaName":551,"dataGaLocation":464},"/solutions/gitops/",{"text":167,"config":609},{"href":169,"dataGaName":170,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":611,"config":612},"Small business",{"href":174,"dataGaName":175,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":614,"config":615},"Public sector",{"href":179,"dataGaName":180,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":617,"config":618},"Education",{"href":619,"dataGaName":620,"dataGaLocation":464},"/solutions/education/","education",{"text":622,"config":623},"Financial services",{"href":624,"dataGaName":625,"dataGaLocation":464},"/solutions/finance/","financial services",{"title":187,"links":627},[628,630,632,634,637,639,641,643,645,647,649,651],{"text":199,"config":629},{"href":201,"dataGaName":202,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":204,"config":631},{"href":206,"dataGaName":207,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":209,"config":633},{"href":211,"dataGaName":212,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":214,"config":635},{"href":216,"dataGaName":636,"dataGaLocation":464},"docs",{"text":237,"config":638},{"href":239,"dataGaName":240,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":232,"config":640},{"href":234,"dataGaName":235,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":242,"config":642},{"href":244,"dataGaName":245,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":250,"config":644},{"href":252,"dataGaName":253,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":255,"config":646},{"href":257,"dataGaName":258,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":260,"config":648},{"href":262,"dataGaName":263,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":265,"config":650},{"href":267,"dataGaName":268,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":270,"config":652},{"href":272,"dataGaName":273,"dataGaLocation":464},{"title":288,"links":654},[655,657,659,661,663,665,667,671,676,678,680,682],{"text":295,"config":656},{"href":297,"dataGaName":290,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":300,"config":658},{"href":302,"dataGaName":303,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":308,"config":660},{"href":310,"dataGaName":311,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":313,"config":662},{"href":315,"dataGaName":316,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":318,"config":664},{"href":320,"dataGaName":321,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":323,"config":666},{"href":325,"dataGaName":326,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":668,"config":669},"Sustainability",{"href":670,"dataGaName":668,"dataGaLocation":464},"/sustainability/",{"text":672,"config":673},"Diversity, inclusion and belonging (DIB)",{"href":674,"dataGaName":675,"dataGaLocation":464},"/diversity-inclusion-belonging/","Diversity, inclusion and belonging",{"text":328,"config":677},{"href":330,"dataGaName":331,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":338,"config":679},{"href":340,"dataGaName":341,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":343,"config":681},{"href":345,"dataGaName":346,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":683,"config":684},"Modern Slavery Transparency Statement",{"href":685,"dataGaName":686,"dataGaLocation":464},"https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/legal/modern-slavery-act-transparency-statement/","modern slavery transparency statement",{"items":688},[689,692,695],{"text":690,"config":691},"Terms",{"href":516,"dataGaName":517,"dataGaLocation":464},{"text":693,"config":694},"Cookies",{"dataGaName":526,"dataGaLocation":464,"id":527,"isOneTrustButton":12},{"text":696,"config":697},"Privacy",{"href":521,"dataGaName":522,"dataGaLocation":464},[699],{"id":700,"title":18,"body":8,"config":701,"content":703,"description":8,"extension":25,"meta":707,"navigation":12,"path":708,"seo":709,"stem":710,"__hash__":711},"blogAuthors/en-us/blog/authors/patrick-steinhardt.yml",{"template":702},"BlogAuthor",{"name":18,"config":704},{"headshot":705,"ctfId":706},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749661952/Blog/Author%20Headshots/pks-gitlab-headshot.png","pksgitlab",{},"/en-us/blog/authors/patrick-steinhardt",{},"en-us/blog/authors/patrick-steinhardt","SV9Yd_vW69UbvntDP-SEOV9NKT_VwUAj5nfftf2ElSw",[713,726,737],{"content":714,"config":724},{"title":715,"description":716,"authors":717,"heroImage":719,"date":720,"body":721,"category":9,"tags":722},"GitLab AI Hackathon 2026: Meet the winners","Nearly 7,000 developers built 600+ AI agents and flows on GitLab Duo Agent Platform. Find out who won and what they created.",[718],"Nick Veenhof","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1776457632/llddiylsgwuze0u1rjks.png","2026-04-22","AI writes code. That is expected now. But planning, security, compliance, and deployments? Those gaps remain. I have run contributor programs for years. I have never seen a community respond to technology like this.\n\nThat is why we opened [GitLab Duo Agent Platform](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-duo-agent-platform/) and invited developers worldwide to build AI agents that help teams ship secure software faster. Not chatbots that answer questions, but agents that jump into workflows, respond to events, and act on your behalf. The GitLab AI Hackathon ran from February 9 to March 25, 2026, on Devpost, the hackathon platform. Google Cloud and Anthropic joined as co-sponsors.\n\nWhen my team planned this hackathon with Google Cloud and Anthropic, I asked the judges to score four things: technical work, design, potential impact, and idea quality. We hoped for strong turnout. What we got surprised all of us. Nineteen judges spent 18 days reviewing every entry. Google Cloud and Anthropic provided judges, prizes, and cloud access. The community built hundreds of agents and flows because they wanted to solve these problems.\n\nNearly 7,000 developers showed up. They built 600+ agents and flows in weeks. The prizes across all categories totaled $65,000 from GitLab, Google Cloud, and Anthropic.\n\n\nIf you have ever watched a senior engineer leave and take half the team's knowledge with them, you know why the winning project hit so hard.\n\nRead on to find out what the community built.\n\n## Grand Prize: LORE\n\n[LORE](https://devpost.com/software/lore-living-organizational-record-engine), the Living Organizational Record Engine, uses eight agents with a router that sends each question to the right agent, logic to prevent circular loops in the knowledge graph, a visual dashboard, and carbon tracking. The command-line tool ships with 43 tests (yes, 43 tests in a hackathon project).\n\nLORE solves a real problem: the knowledge that lives in engineers' heads and walks out the door when they leave. In my experience, a hackathon project with 43 tests is rare. That many tests in a hackathon project tells you something about the team behind it.\n\nJudge April Guo (Anthropic) wrote: \"This feels like a product, not a hackathon project.\"\n\n\n### Google Cloud winners\n\n[Gitdefender](https://devpost.com/software/gitdefender) won the Google Cloud Grand Prize. It works inside code review workflows, finding and fixing security issues. It spots the bug, writes the fix, and opens the code review. No developer needs to step in.\n\n[Aegis](https://devpost.com/software/aegis-2m1oq0) won the Google Cloud Runner Up. It gives AI-powered explanations for every decision it makes, deployed to Google Cloud and ready for production use.\n\n### Anthropic winners\n\n[GraphDev](https://devpost.com/software/graphdev) won the Anthropic Grand Prize. It maps code links and shows how systems change over time. Judge Aboobacker MK (GitLab) noted it was \"in sync with our work on GitLab knowledge graph.\" Judge Ayush Billore (GitLab) wrote: \"Loved the demo and UX, super useful for understanding how the system evolved and what gets impacted by changes.\" You can see the full impact of a change before you make it.\n\n[DocSync](https://devpost.com/software/pipeheal) won the Anthropic Runner Up. It uses three agents: Detector, Writer, and Reviewer. If DocSync is confident in the fix, it opens a code review. If not, it creates an issue for a human to check.\n\n## Category winners\n\n### Most Technically Impressive\n\nDatabase migrations break things. [Time-Traveler](https://devpost.com/software/time-traveler-w3cxp0) creates a safe copy of your production setup, runs the migration against that copy, and reports the result. It runs five agents connected by a bridge, with real Google Cloud deployment, real PostgreSQL migrations, and real data.\n\n### Most Impactful\n\n[RedAgent](https://devpost.com/software/redagent) checks AI-generated security reports, closing the trust gap between AI findings and developer action. If your team uses AI for security scanning, you know this problem. I have seen teams dismiss AI findings because they could not verify them. RedAgent gives teams a way to check AI output before it reaches developers.\n\n### Easiest to Use\n\n[Launch Control](https://devpost.com/software/launch-control-bgp8az) delivers polished UX and solid infrastructure, and scored well on sustainability too.\n\n## The sustainability signal\n\nFive projects won prizes or bonuses for environmental impact. Software delivery has a carbon cost as CI/CD pipelines, but now LLMs also run compute at scale. We created the Green Agent category to challenge developers to measure and reduce that footprint. Stacy Cline and Kim Buncle from GitLab's sustainability team helped judge the Green Agent category. \n\n### Green Agent prize\n\n[GreenPipe](https://devpost.com/software/greenpipe) scans CI/CD pipelines for environmental impact and produces carbon footprint reports. Judges Kim Buncle and Rajesh Agadi (Google) both backed the project.\n\n### Sustainable Design bonus\n\nSustainable Design bonuses were awarded to the projects with exceptional sustainability practices in their design, from model optimization techniques to energy-efficient architecture choices.\n\n* [BugFlow](https://devpost.com/software/bugflow-ai-regression-detective-ci-optimizer) turned one bug report into 10 fixes in 20 minutes. \n* [DELTA Cyber Reasoning](https://devpost.com/software/delta-cyber-reasoning-system) is automated fuzz testing for security. \n* [CarbonLint](https://devpost.com/software/carbonlint) applied code analysis to energy use.\n* [TFGuardian](https://devpost.com/software/tfguardian) features a carbon footprint analyzer, among other agents.\n\nCongratulations on all the Sustainable Design bonus winners! \n\nJudge Jens-Joris Decorte (TechWolf) cited the result: Costs dropped from $556 to $18 per month, a 96% carbon cut (that is a $538 monthly saving with a sustainability label on it).\n\n## Honorable mentions and the long tail\n\nSix projects received honorable mentions:\n\n\n- [SecurityMonkey](https://devpost.com/software/securitymonkey) injects known vulnerabilities into a test branch and scores how well your security scanners catch them.\n- [stregent](https://devpost.com/software/stregent) monitors CI/CD pipelines and lets developers investigate and merge fixes from WhatsApp without opening a laptop.\n- [Compliance Sentinel](https://devpost.com/software/compliance-sentinel-autonomous-devsecops-governance) scores every merge request for compliance risk and blocks the merge if critical violations are detected.\n- [Carbon Tracker](https://devpost.com/software/carbon-tracker-ij25kf) calculates the carbon footprint of each CI/CD pipeline job and posts optimization tips on the merge request.\n- [RepoWarden](https://devpost.com/software/docuguard) is the first Living Specification Engine, an AI system that captures why code was written, not just what it does.\n- [MR Compliance Auditor](https://devpost.com/software/mr-compliance-auditor) collects evidence across merge requests, maps it to SOC 2 controls, and streams compliance scores to a live dashboard.\n\nMy favorite quote from the judging came from Luca Chun Lun Lit (Anthropic), who described stregent's mobile-first approach: \"Being able to essentially code from your phone is a next level in the engineering experience.\"\n\n> Explore the 600+ entries in the [project gallery](https://gitlab.devpost.com/project-gallery).\n\n## What comes next\n\nEvery agent in this hackathon worked within a single project. They still delivered impressive results. Some participants ran a local knowledge graph alongside their agents to surface code relationships and dependencies within the repo. LORE captures project history. Gitdefender finds vulnerabilities. Pairing agents with richer local context is already helping contributors build sharper tools. The next hackathon will build on what contributors are already doing with richer context. Sign up on [contributors.gitlab.com](https://contributors.gitlab.com/) to be the first to know when details drop.\n\n\n## Get started\n\nA special thanks to Lee Tickett (GitLab) and Mattias Michaux (GitLab) for orchestrating the orchestrators and innovators behind this hackathon!\n\nThank you to every developer who submitted. Nearly 7,000 of you showed what GitLab Duo Agent Platform can do when a community decides to build. I am proud of what you built here, and I cannot wait to see what you build next.\n\nBuild your own agent on [GitLab Duo Agent Platform](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/duo_agent_platform/). Browse community-built agents in the [AI Catalog](https://docs.gitlab.com/user/duo_agent_platform/ai_catalog/). You orchestrate. AI accelerates.\n",[723,258],"AI/ML",{"featured":29,"template":13,"slug":725},"gitlab-ai-hackathon-2026-meet-the-winners",{"content":727,"config":735},{"title":728,"description":729,"authors":730,"heroImage":731,"date":732,"category":9,"tags":733,"body":734},"What’s new in Git 2.54.0?","Learn about release contributions, including new repository maintenance, a new command to edit commit history, a replacement for git-sizer(1), and more.",[18],"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1776711651/sj7xxyyuimlarswbyft5.png","2026-04-20",[23,24,258],"The Git project recently released [Git 2.54.0](https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqqa4uxsjrs.fsf@gitster.g/T/#u). Let's look at a few notable highlights from this release, which includes contributions from the Git team at GitLab.\n\n## Pluggable Object Databases\n\nGit already has the ability to store references with either the \"files\" backend or with the [\"reftable\" backend](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/a-beginners-guide-to-the-git-reftable-format/). This is achieved by having proper abstractions in Git that allows us to have different backends.\n\nBut references are just one of the two important types of data that are stored in repositories, with the other being objects. Objects are stored in the object database, and each object database in turn consists of multiple object sources where objects can be read from or written to. Each object source either stores individual objects as so-called \"loose\" objects, or compresses multiple objects into a \"packfile\" in your `.git/objects` directory.\n\nUntil now, however, these sources did not have a proper abstraction boundary, so the storage format for objects is completely hardcoded into Git. But this is finally changing with pluggable object databases! The concept is straightforward and similar to how we did this for references in the past: Instead of having hardcoded code paths for how to store objects, we introduce an abstraction boundary that allows us to have different backends for storing objects.\n\nWhile the idea is simple, the implementation is not, as we have hardcoded assumptions about the storage formats used in Git all over the place. In fact, we have started working on this topic in Git 2.48, which was released in January 2025. Initially, we focused on making object-related subsystems self-contained and creating proper subsystems for the existing backends that we had in Git.\n\nWith Git 2.54, we have now reached a milestone: The object database backend is now pluggable. Not all of Git's functionality is covered yet, but introducing an alternate backend that handles a meaningful subset of operations is now a realistic undertaking.\n\nFor now, only local workflows like creating commits, showing commit graphs, or performing merges will work with such an alternative implementation. This notably excludes anything that interacts with a remote, such as when you want to fetch or push changes. Regardless, this is the culmination of almost two years of work spanning across almost 400 commits that have been merged upstream, and we will of course continue to iterate on this effort.\n\nSo why does this matter? The idea is that it becomes practical to introduce new storage formats into Git. Examples could be:\n- A storage format that is able to store large binary files more efficiently\n  than packfiles do today\n\n- A storage format that is custom-tailored for GitLab to ensure that we can\n  serve repositories to our users even more efficiently than we currently can\n\n\nThis is a large-scale effort that is likely to shape the future of Git and GitLab.\n\n*This project was led by [Patrick Steinhardt](https://gitlab.com/pks-gitlab).*\n\n## Easier editing of your commit history\n\nIn many software development projects it is common practice for developers to not only polish the code they want to contribute, but to also polish the commit history so that it becomes easy to review. The result is a set of small and atomic commits that each do one thing, with a good commit message that describes the intent of the commit as well as specific nuances.\n\nOf course, more often than not, these atomic commits are not something that just happens naturally during the development process. Instead, the author of the changes will gain a better understanding of what they are while iterating on them, and the way to split up the commits will become clearer over time. Furthermore, the subsequent review process may result in feedback that requires changes to the crafted commits.\n\nThe consequence of this process is that the developer will have to rewrite their commit history many times during the development process. Historically, Git has allowed for this use case via [interactive rebases](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-rebase#_interactive_mode). These interactive rebases are an extremely powerful tool: They let you reorder commits, rewrite commit messages, squash multiple commits together, or perform arbitrary edits of any commit.\n\nBut they are also somewhat arcane and hard to understand. The user needs to figure out the base commit for the rebase, they need to understand how to edit a somewhat obscure \"instruction sheet,\" and they need to be aware of how the stateful rebasing process works. For example, users are presented with an instruction sheet similar to the following when rebasing a topic branch:\n\n```shell\npick b60623f382 # t: detect errors outside of test cases # empty\npick b80cb55882 # t: prepare `test_match_signal ()` calls for `set -e`\npick 5ffe397f30 # t: prepare `test_must_fail ()` for `set -e`\npick 5e9b0cf5e1 # t: prepare `stop_git_daemon ()` for `set -e`\npick 299561e7a2 # t: prepare `git config --unset` calls for `set -e`\npick ed0e7ca2b5 # t: detect errors outside of test cases\n```\n\nSo while interactive rebases are powerful, they are also quite intimidating for the average user.\n\nIt doesn't have to be this way, though. Tools like [Jujutsu](https://www.jj-vcs.dev/latest/) provide interfaces that are much easier to use compared to Git, as you can for example simply execute `jj split` to split up a commit into two commits. With Git and interactive rebases, this use case requires a lot of different steps with confusing command line arguments.\n\nWe have thus taken inspiration from Jujutsu and have introduced a new git-history(1) command into Git that is the foundation for better history editing. For now, this command has two subcommands:\n\n- `git history reword` allows you to easily rewrite a commit message. You simply\n  give it the commit whose message you want to reword, Git asks you for the new\n  commit message, and that's it.\n\n- `git history split` allows you to split up a commit into two, which is\n  inspired by `jj split`. You give it a commit, Git asks you which changes to\n  stage into which commit and for the two commit messages, and then you're done.\n\n\nThis is of course only a start, and we want to add additional subcommands over time. For example:\n\n- `git history fixup` to take staged changes and automatically amend them to a\n  specific commit\n\n- `git history drop` to remove a commit\n- `git history reorder` to reorder the sequence of commits\n- `git history squash` to squash a range of commits\n\nBut that's not all! In addition to making history editing easy, this new command also knows to automatically rebase all of your local branches that previously included this commit. So that means that you can even edit a commit that is not on the current branch, and all branches that contain the commit will be rewritten.\n\nIt may seem puzzling at first that Git is automatically rebasing dependent branches, as that is a significant diversion from how git-rebase(1) works. But this is part of a bigger effort to bring better support for Stacked Diffs to Git, which are a way to create a series of multiple dependent branches that can be reviewed independently, but that together work towards a bigger goal.\n\n*This project was led by [Patrick Steinhardt](https://gitlab.com/pks-gitlab) with support from [Elijah Newren](https://github.com/newren).*\n\n## A native replacement for git-sizer(1)\n\nThe size of a Git repository is an important factor that determines how well Git and GitLab can handle it. But size alone is not the only factor, as the performance of a repository is ultimately a combination of multiple different dimensions:\n\n- The depth of the commit history\n- The shape of the directory structure\n- The size of files stored in the repository\n- The number of references\n\nThese are only some of the dimensions one needs to consider when trying to predict whether Git will be able to handle a repository well.\n\nBut while it is clear that the mere repository size is insufficient, Git itself does not provide any tooling that gives the user an easy overview of these metrics. Instead, users are forced to rely on third-party tools like [git-sizer(1)](https://github.com/github/git-sizer) to fill this gap. This tool does an excellent job at surfacing this information, but it is not part of Git itself and thus needs to be installed separately.\n\nObservability of repository internals is critical to us at GitLab, so we introduced a [new `git repo structure` command into Git 2.52](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/whats-new-in-git-2-52-0/#new-subcommand-for-git-repo1-to-display-repository-metrics) to display repository metrics, which we have extended in Git 2.53 to [show inflated and disk sizes for objects by type](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/whats-new-in-git-2-53-0/#more-data-collected-in-git-repo-structure).\n\nIn Git 2.54, we are now iterating some more on this command so that we don't only show the overall size, but also show the largest objects by type:\n\n```shell\n$ git clone https://gitlab.com/git-scm/git.git\n$ cd git\n$ git repo structure\nCounting objects: 410445, done.\n| Repository structure      | Value       |\n| ------------------------- | ----------- |\n| * References              |             |\n|   * Count                 |    1.01 k   |\n|     * Branches            |       1     |\n|     * Tags                |    1.00 k   |\n|     * Remotes             |       9     |\n|     * Others              |       0     |\n|                           |             |\n| * Reachable objects       |             |\n|   * Count                 |  410.45 k   |\n|     * Commits             |   83.99 k   |\n|     * Trees               |  164.46 k   |\n|     * Blobs               |  161.00 k   |\n|     * Tags                |    1.00 k   |\n|   * Inflated size         |    7.46 GiB |\n|     * Commits             |   57.53 MiB |\n|     * Trees               |    2.33 GiB |\n|     * Blobs               |    5.07 GiB |\n|     * Tags                |  737.48 KiB |\n|   * Disk size             |  181.37 MiB |\n|     * Commits             |   33.11 MiB |\n|     * Trees               |   40.58 MiB |\n|     * Blobs               |  107.11 MiB |\n|     * Tags                |  582.67 KiB |\n|                           |             |\n| * Largest objects         |             |\n|   * Commits               |             |\n|     * Maximum size    [1] |   17.23 KiB |\n|     * Maximum parents [2] |      10     |\n|   * Trees                 |             |\n|     * Maximum size    [3] |   58.85 KiB |\n|     * Maximum entries [4] |    1.18 k   |\n|   * Blobs                 |             |\n|     * Maximum size    [5] | 1019.51 KiB |\n|   * Tags                  |             |\n\n|     * Maximum size    [6] |    7.13 KiB |\n\n[1] f6ecb603ff8af608a417d7724727d6bc3a9dbfdf\n[2] 16d7601e176cd53f3c2f02367698d06b85e08879\n[3] 203ee97047731b9fd3ad220faa607b6677861a0d\n[4] 203ee97047731b9fd3ad220faa607b6677861a0d\n[5] aa96f8bc361fd84a1459440f1e7de02ab0dc3543\n[6] 07e38db6a5a03690034d27104401f6c8ea40f1fc\n```\n\nWith this information we're now almost feature-complete as compared to git-sizer(1). We're not done yet, though — we plan to eventually add additional features such as:\n\n- Severity levels as they exist in git-sizer(1)\n- Graphs that show you the distribution of object sizes\n- The ability to scan objects reachable via a subset of references\n\n*This project was led by [Justin Tobler](https://gitlab.com/justintobler).*\n\n## New infrastructure for repository maintenance\n\nWhenever you write data into a Git repository you will typically end up adding more loose objects. Left unmanaged, this leads to a large number of separate files in your `.git/objects/` directory, which slows down several operations that want to access many objects at once. Git thus regularly packs these objects into \"packfiles\" to ensure good performance.\n\nThis isn't the only data structure that may become inefficient over time: Updating references may create loose references, reflogs will need trimming, worktrees may become stale, and caches like commit-graphs need to be refreshed regularly.\n\nAll of these tasks have historically been managed by [git-gc(1)](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-gc). However, this tool has a monolithic architecture, where it basically executes all of the tasks required in sequential order. This foundation is hard to extend and doesn't give the end user much flexibility in case they want to slightly modify how housekeeping is performed.\n\nThe Git project introduced the new [git-maintenance(1)](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-maintenance) tool in Git 2.29. In contrast to git-gc(1), git-maintenance(1) is not monolithic but is instead structured around tasks. These tasks are freely configurable by the user so that the user can control which tasks are running, giving them much more fine-grained control over repository maintenance.\n\nEventually, Git has migrated to use git-maintenance(1) by default. But in the beginning, the only task that was default-enabled was the git-gc(1) task, which as you might have guessed, simply executes `git gc`. To manually run maintenance using this new command you can execute `git maintenance run`, but Git knows to execute this automatically after several other commands.\n\nOver the last couple releases we have implemented all the individual tasks that are supported by git-gc(1) in git-maintenance(1) to ensure that we have feature parity between these two tools.\n\nFurthermore, we have implemented a new task that uses Git's modern architecture for repacking objects with [geometric compaction](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-repack#Documentation/git-repack.txt---geometricfactor).\nGeometric compaction is a much better fit for large monorepos, and with our efforts to make them work well with partial clones [that landed in Git 2.53](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/whats-new-in-git-2-53-0/#geometric-repacking-support-with-promisor-remotes) they are now a full replacement for our previous repacking strategy in Git.\n\nIn Git 2.54, we have now reached another significant milestone: Instead of using the git-gc(1)-based strategy by default, we are now using geometric repacking with fine-grained individual maintenance tasks! Besides being more efficient for large monorepos, it also ensures that we have an easier foundation to iterate on going forward.\n\n*The git-maintenance(1) infrastructure was originally implemented by [Derrick Stolee](https://github.com/derrickstolee) and geometric maintenance was introduced by [Taylor Blau](https://github.com/ttaylorr). The effort to introduce the new fine-grained tasks and migrate to the new maintenance strategy was led by [Patrick Steinhardt](https://gitlab.com/pks-gitlab).*\n\n## Read more\n\nThis article highlighted just a few of the contributions made by GitLab and the wider Git community for this latest release. You can learn about these from the [official release announcement](https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqqa4uxsjrs.fsf@gitster.g/T/#u) of the Git project. Also, check out our [previous Git release blog posts](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/tags/git/) to see other past highlights of contributions from GitLab team members.",{"slug":736,"featured":29,"template":13},"whats-new-in-git-2-54-0",{"content":738,"config":747},{"title":739,"description":740,"authors":741,"date":743,"body":744,"heroImage":745,"category":9,"tags":746},"What’s new in Git 2.53.0?","Learn about release contributions, including fixes for geometric repacking, updates to git-fast-import(1) commit signature handing options, and more.",[742],"Justin Tobler","2026-02-02","The Git project recently released [Git 2.53.0](https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqq4inz13e3.fsf@gitster.g/T/#u). Let's look at a few notable highlights from this release, which includes\ncontributions from the Git team at GitLab.\n\n## Geometric repacking support with promisor remotes\n\nNewly written objects in a Git repository are often stored as individual loose files. To ensure good performance and optimal use of disk space, these loose objects are regularly compressed into so-called packfiles. The number of packfiles in a repository grows over time as a result of the user’s activities, like writing new commits or fetching from a remote. As the number of packfiles in a repository increases, Git has to do more work to look up individual objects. Therefore, to preserve optimal repository performance, packfiles are periodically repacked via git-repack(1) to consolidate the objects into fewer packfiles. When repacking there are two strategies: “all-into-one” and “geometric”.\n\nThe all-into-one strategy is fairly straightforward and the current default. As its name implies, all objects in the repository are packed into a single packfile. From a performance perspective this is great for the repository as Git only has to scan through a single packfile when looking up objects. The main downside of such a repacking strategy is that computing a single packfile for a repository can take a significant amount of time for large repositories.\n\nThe geometric strategy helps mitigate this concern by maintaining a geometric progression of packfiles based on their size instead of always repacking into a single packfile. To explain more plainly, when repacking Git maintains a set of packfiles ordered by size where each packfile in the sequence is expected to be at least twice the size of the preceding packfile. If a packfile in the sequence violates this property, packfiles are combined as needed until the progression is restored. This strategy has the advantage of still minimizing the number of packfiles in a repository while also minimizing the amount of work that must be done for most repacking operations.\n\nOne problem with the geometric repacking strategy was that it was not compatible with partial clones. Partial clones allow the user to clone only parts of a repository by, for example, skipping all blobs larger than 1 megabyte. This can significantly reduce the size of a repository, and Git knows how to backfill missing objects that it needs to access at a later point in time.\n\nThe result is a repository that is missing some objects, and any object that may not be fully connected is stored in a “promisor” packfile.  When repacking, this promisor property needs to be retained going forward for packfiles containing a promisor object so it is known whether a missing object is expected and can be backfilled from the promisor remote. With an all-into-one repack, Git knows how to handle promisor objects properly and stores them in a separate promisor packfile. Unfortunately, the geometric repacking strategy did not know to give special treatment to promisor packfiles and instead would merge them with normal packfiles without considering whether they reference promisor objects. Luckily, due to a bug the underlying git-pack-objects(1) dies when using geometric repacking in a partial clone repository. So this means repositories in this configuration were not able to be repacked anyways which isn’t great, but better than repository corruption.\n\nWith the release of Git 2.53, geometric repacking now works with partial clone repositories. When performing a geometric repack, promisor packfiles are handled separately in order to preserve the promisor marker and repacked following a separate geometric progression. With this fix, the geometric strategy moves closer towards becoming the default repacking strategy. For more information check out the corresponding [mailing list thread](https://lore.kernel.org/git/20260105-pks-geometric-repack-with-promisors-v1-0-c4660573437e@pks.im/).\n\nThis project was led by [Patrick Steinhardt](https://gitlab.com/pks-gitlab).\n\n## git-fast-import(1) learned to preserve only valid signatures\n\nIn our [Git 2.52 release article](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/whats-new-in-git-2-52-0/), we covered signature related improvements to git-fast-import(1) and git-fast-export(1). Be sure to check out that post for a more detailed explanation of these commands, how they are used, and the changes being made with regards to signatures.\n\nTo quickly recap, git-fast-import(1) provides a backend to efficiently import data into a repository and is used by tools such as [git-filter-repo(1)](https://github.com/newren/git-filter-repo) to help rewrite the history of a repository in bulk. In the Git 2.52 release, git-fast-import(1) learned the `--signed-commits=\u003Cmode>` option similar to the same option in git-fast-export(1). With this option, it became possible to unconditionally retain or strip signatures from commits/tags.\n\nIn situations where only part of the repository history has been rewritten, any signature for rewritten commits/tags becomes invalid. This means git-fast-import(1) is limited to either stripping all signatures or keeping all signatures even if they have become invalid. But retaining invalid signatures doesn’t make much sense, so rewriting history with git-repo-filter(1) results in all signatures being stripped, even if the underlying commit/tag is not rewritten. This is unfortunate because if the commit/tag is unchanged, its signature is still valid and thus there is no real reason to strip it. What is really needed is a means to preserve signatures for unchanged objects, but strip invalid ones.\n\nWith the release of Git 2.53, the git-fast-import(1) `--signed-commits=\u003Cmode>` option has learned a new `strip-if-invalid` mode which, when specified, only strips signatures from commits that become invalid due to being rewritten. Thus, with this option it becomes possible to preserve some commit signatures when using git-fast-import(1). This is a critical step towards providing the foundation for tools like git-repo-filter(1) to preserve valid signatures and eventually re-sign invalid signatures.\n\nThis project was led by [Christian Couder](https://gitlab.com/chriscool).\n\n## More data collected in git-repo-structure\n\nIn the Git 2.52 release, the “structure” subcommand was introduced to git-repo(1). The intent of this command was to collect information about the repository and eventually become a native replacement for tools such as [git-sizer(1)](https://github.com/github/git-sizer). At GitLab, we host some extremely large repositories, and having insight into the general structure of a repository is critical to understand its performance characteristics. In this release, the command now also collects total size information for reachable objects in a repository to help understand the overall size of the repository. In the output below, you can see the command now collects both the total inflated and disk sizes of reachable objects by object type.\n\n```shell\n$ git repo structure\n\n| Repository structure | Value      |\n| -------------------- | ---------- |\n| * References         |            |\n|   * Count            |   1.78 k   |\n|     * Branches       |      5     |\n|     * Tags           |   1.03 k   |\n|     * Remotes        |    749     |\n|     * Others         |      0     |\n|                      |            |\n| * Reachable objects  |            |\n|   * Count            | 421.37 k   |\n|     * Commits        |  88.03 k   |\n|     * Trees          | 169.95 k   |\n|     * Blobs          | 162.40 k   |\n|     * Tags           |    994     |\n|   * Inflated size    |   7.61 GiB |\n|     * Commits        |  60.95 MiB |\n|     * Trees          |   2.44 GiB |\n|     * Blobs          |   5.11 GiB |\n|     * Tags           | 731.73 KiB |\n|   * Disk size        | 301.50 MiB |\n|     * Commits        |  33.57 MiB |\n|     * Trees          |  77.92 MiB |\n|     * Blobs          | 189.44 MiB |\n|     * Tags           | 578.13 KiB |\n```\n\nThe keen-eyed among you may have also noticed that the size values in the table output are also now listed in a more human-friendly manner with units appended. In subsequent releases we hope to further expand this command's output to provide additional data points such as the largest individual objects in the repository.\n\nThis project was led by [Justin Tobler](https://gitlab.com/justintobler).\n\n## Read more\n\nThis article highlighted just a few of the contributions made by GitLab and\nthe wider Git community for this latest release. You can learn about these from\nthe [official release announcement](https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqq4inz13e3.fsf@gitster.g/T/#u) of the Git project. Also, check\nout our [previous Git release blog posts](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/tags/git/)\nto see other past highlights of contributions from GitLab team members.","https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1749663087/Blog/Hero%20Images/git3-cover.png",[23,24,258],{"featured":12,"template":13,"slug":748},"whats-new-in-git-2-53-0",{"promotions":750},[751,765,777,789],{"id":752,"categories":753,"header":755,"text":756,"button":757,"image":762},"ai-modernization",[754],"ai-ml","Is AI achieving its promise at scale?","Quiz will take 5 minutes or less",{"text":758,"config":759},"Get your AI maturity score",{"href":760,"dataGaName":761,"dataGaLocation":240},"/assessments/ai-modernization-assessment/","modernization assessment",{"config":763},{"src":764},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/qix0m7kwnd8x2fh1zq49.png",{"id":766,"categories":767,"header":769,"text":756,"button":770,"image":774},"devops-modernization",[768,566],"product","Are you just managing tools or shipping innovation?",{"text":771,"config":772},"Get your DevOps maturity score",{"href":773,"dataGaName":761,"dataGaLocation":240},"/assessments/devops-modernization-assessment/",{"config":775},{"src":776},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138785/eg818fmakweyuznttgid.png",{"id":778,"categories":779,"header":781,"text":756,"button":782,"image":786},"security-modernization",[780],"security","Are you trading speed for security?",{"text":783,"config":784},"Get your security maturity score",{"href":785,"dataGaName":761,"dataGaLocation":240},"/assessments/security-modernization-assessment/",{"config":787},{"src":788},"https://res.cloudinary.com/about-gitlab-com/image/upload/v1772138786/p4pbqd9nnjejg5ds6mdk.png",{"id":790,"paths":791,"header":794,"text":795,"button":796,"image":801},"github-azure-migration",[792,793],"migration-from-azure-devops-to-gitlab","integrating-azure-devops-scm-and-gitlab","Is your team ready for GitHub's Azure move?","GitHub is already rebuilding around Azure. Find out what it means for you.",{"text":797,"config":798},"See how GitLab compares to GitHub",{"href":799,"dataGaName":800,"dataGaLocation":240},"/compare/gitlab-vs-github/github-azure-migration/","github azure migration",{"config":802},{"src":776},{"header":804,"blurb":805,"button":806,"secondaryButton":811},"Start building faster today","See what your team can do with the intelligent orchestration platform for DevSecOps.\n",{"text":807,"config":808},"Get your free trial",{"href":809,"dataGaName":47,"dataGaLocation":810},"https://gitlab.com/-/trial_registrations/new?glm_content=default-saas-trial&glm_source=about.gitlab.com/","feature",{"text":502,"config":812},{"href":51,"dataGaName":52,"dataGaLocation":810},1777317517476]