WindowsInstall
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
- MinGW-based recompilation (http://repo.or.cz/w/git/mingw.git) <
>Packaged version (using NSIS) is available at http://lilypond.org/git/binaries/mingw/ - 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
Git is now a cygwin binary package, directly installable without needing to compile it.
Otherwise, to be able to build git directly from source, you will need to install cygwin and the following packages:
- tcltk (for gitk and git-gui)
- perl
- openssh
- openssl (and -dev)
- libiconv
- zip (and -dev)
- curl (and -dev), optional if compiled with NO_CURL=1
- expat (and -dev), optional if compiled with NO_CURL=1
- make
- gcc
- binutils (sorta necessary to compile!)
- patchutils (at least for the t4109-apply-multifrag.sh tests)
- cpio (at least for the t5400-send-pack.sh tests)
- xmlto to build the man pages
- util-linux: just to have getopt (required by xmlto)
- asciidoc to build documents (http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/INSTALL.html)
- python to build documents
With these packages installed download the git source package from the git homepage and then unpack it with:
tar xvzf git-x.y.z.tar.gz (or tar xvjf git-x.y.z.tar.bz2)
Then, 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 disks don't support the filesystem semantics GIT needs; for interoperability purposes you can store bare repositories on FAT32 disks.
- Be careful with the case in filenames. Similarly, avoid special chars in filenames.
- Run git gc early and often. There are slowdowns with many unpacked objects. Be careful to not create very big packfiles (bigger than 2 Gb).
- Avoid using ActiveState Perl 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. Besides Cygwin detects file mode by stupid combination of content analysis, file name extension and moon phase.
- Insert "set CYGWIN=tty binmode" after the first line of C:\cygwin\cygwin.bat, so you can use Ctrl-z in cygwin's bash to suspend a program.
- Windows usually writes end-of-line as CRLF, while Unix/POSIX writes LF. This can cause a variety of problems. There are current efforts to address this.
- Setup binary mode for cygwin (there is an option in cygwin's setup program), otherwise Cygwin mangles everything read and written (Git repos have binary files in control structures).
- Avoid big repos.
- Avoid Big Blobs (very big files. Basically anything larger than 10Mb is too big).
- Avoid Big Trees (directories with many files in them).
- Avoid Deep Hierarchies.
- Reboot regularly (memory fragmentation)
- Defragment often (filesystems fragmentation)