Why embedding an old Git in Sourcetree?

[Antoine Cœur]

In latest Sourcetree (2.0.5.2) for mac, embedded Git is 2.2.1. I know we can use SYSTEM GIT, but why embedding an old Git in the first place?

OS X Git is: 

git version 2.3.2 (Apple Git-55)

Brew Git is:

2.4.0 (http://braumeister.org/search?search=git)

Official Git is:

2.4.1 (http://git-scm.com/downloads)

You should at least match the OS X Git version, or auto-use the latest Git you can detect.

[Seth]

"In the first place" - it WAS the latest when it was embedded. Since the UI is completely dependent on the git commands and responses, it is not a trivial thing to change which version of Git is embedded. As you said, you can do it yourself by using system git, but that comes with some risk that SourceTree won't be compatible.

[Antoine Cœur]

OK.

But then, newer versions of Git were released:

• 2.2.2 on 13 Jan
• 2.3.0 on 6 Feb
• 2.3.1 on 25 Feb
• 2.3.2 on 7 Mar (Apple is using it for OS X Yosemite)
• 2.3.3 on 14 Mar
• 2.3.4 on 24 Mar
• 2.3.5 on 1 Apr
• 2.3.6 on 22 Apr
• 2.3.7 on 28 Apr
• 2.4.0 on 1 May
• 2.4.1 on 14 May

As SourceTree is a popular tool which first and main purpose is dealing with Git support, it should update more often to keep its value. As of now, SourceTree is 11 stable versions late, and I'm not counting in base 2.

[Seth]

Keep in mind that updating the embedded version of Git would require complete revalidation of every feature in the app that is for Git, which is time consuming and takes away from time spent fixing bugs or developing new feature. It would be more fair to count months instead of versions. Or if you really want to count versions, don't count the incremental versions. SourceTree is about 6 months behind, or two "minor" versions (whatever you want to call the second part of the version number). Also, Git itself hasn't updated the builds for Windows since version 1.9.5, which is a whole MAJOR version behind, and surely has a wider user base than all of SourceTree combined.