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)