Revision as of 22:16, 3 October 2006

Currently GIT is only supported on Windows within a Cygwin environment. While this works well, there are several efforts that aim to provide a more native GIT on Windows.

These efforts are

• EclipseIDE-based GIT client, based on a pure Java implmentation of GIT's internals.
• A libgit + cygwin.dll Windows Explorer extension (perhaps based on TortoiseSVN)

Ask on the MailingLists for the latest news on this ;-)

If you have the main development team on linux/unix, and peripheral developers or translators on Windows, consider using `git-cvsserver` to give those users read or read/write access to the GIT tree via the CVS protocol. Committers using `git-cvsserver` have some limits: they cannot branch, tag or merge. On the other hand, git-cvsserver works well with Eclipse, TortoiseCVS and other easy-to-use CVS clients.

Cygwin

Installation

You will need to install cygwin and the following packages to be able to build git:

• rcs (for merge)
• python (for merge-recursive, though merge-recur is a *huge* win)
• wish (for gitk)
• perl
• ssh
• openssl (and -dev)
• zip (and -dev)
• curl (and -dev)
• expat (and -dev)
• make
• gcc
• binutils (sorta necessary to compile!)
• patchutils (at least for the t4109-apply-multifrag.sh tests)

With these packages installed you build git and install it in your ~/bin directory by doing:

make install

If want to be extra careful, you can always run the regression tests:

make test

You are now ready to use GIT. Check that your path includes ~/bin and you are off!

Extra notes

• Use git on local NTFS disks -- Network drives and VFAT disks don't support the filesystem semantics GIT needs.
• Be careful with the case in filenames. Similarly, avoid special chars in filenames.
• Run git repack -a -d early and often. There are slowdowns with many unpacked objects.
• As of version 1.4.x, export GIT_USE_RECUR_FOR_RECURSIVE=1 to replace Python-based git-merge-recursive with a much faster C implementation. Later versions will probably have the C version as default.
• gitk has some pane layout problems. Try resizing the window. Try deleting your .gitk file.
• Avoid using ActivePerl if possible. Ask in the MailingLists if you must.
• Try to avoid interrupting (Ctrl-C) processes - it breaks cygwin.
• Consider setting core.fileMode to false (git repo-config core.fileMode false) if file modes are frequently the only differences detected by Git. Many Windows applications make the execute bit be set in Cygwin when they save a file.