The first test release of the Git 2.52 distributed revision control system is now available. As has been a common trend, Git 2.52 is making further preparations in anticipation of the big Git 3.0 milestone.

Git 3.0 will be potentially released around the end of 2026 and a lot continues to happen in preparing for the breaking changes. Most significant with Git 3.0 is for switching to SHA-256 hashing by default to be more secure than SHA1 hashing.

As part of furthering the SHA-256 efforts, Git 2.52-rc0 brings the beginnings of the SHA1-SHA256 interoperability work. There still is much work to do there but the hope is to have a nice SHA1-SHA256 interoperability experience by the time Git 3.0 releases.

Another change coming with Git 3.0 is using the default branch name of “main” rather than the current default of “master”. For Git 2.52-rc0 was a commit adding new hints to help users with the default name being switched.

“initial branch: give hints after switching the default name

It is likely that those who came to Git after 3.0 switched the default initial branch name to ‘main’ would still try to follow tutorials that were written before 3.0 happened and with the assumption that the tool would call the initial branch ‘master’.

To help these new users after 3.0 boundary, let’s retain one part of the hint we will be giving before the default changes, namely, how to rename the branch an unconfigured Git has created just once.“

The new hint will also inform users how to rename the branch to “master” if so desired such as for matching any tutorials/documentation.

Git 2.52-rc0 also brings improvements to various Git sub-commands, a new “git repo” sub-command to provide users with various repository characteristics, a new “git last-modified” sub-command to show the closest ancestor commit that touched each path, various performance improvements, and other fixes and incremental improvements.

Downloads and more details on today’s Git 2.52-rc0 release via the release announcement.