>> Can anyone enlighten me about the relationship of "Git for Windows" to >> Cygwin? > > They are not related.
Yes, they are. >> But now I hear of this GitForWindows thing. Which seems to have replaced >> MSysGit, with a GUI thrown in. But is it _still_ a stale fork of Cygwin, or >> a >> fork at all? Is it descended from MSysGit? I have been googling all over, >> but not finding good answers. GitForWindows 2.x is based on MSYS2, which doesn't share any non-cygwin code with the old MSYS1 as far as I'm aware, but it reimplements (on top of a much more up-to-date fork of cygwin) the path-mangling trick that was the main motivating factor for using MSYS1 in the first place. When you have a non-cygwin windows executable (one compiled by mingw.org, or mingw-w64, or MSVC compilers) and try to pass it a posix/cygwin-style absolute path, the windows executable won't usually recognize it as a file that exists. What the MSYS shell does is apply a heuristic that automatically translates posix-style absolute paths to Windows paths (similar to manually calling `cygpath -w /posix/style/path` on each argument within cygwin) before passing the argument to the executable. There are other differences between MSYS2 and Cygwin, mostly that it uses a different package manager and repository, but these are less significant with respect to GitForWindows' requirements. The git.exe in Cygwin's git package is a cygwin executable compiled by cygwin's gcc. Hence it understands posix-style paths just fine, but it depends on cygwin1.dll to do so, and may not perform as well as a non-cygwin Windows executable. (Maybe someone has benchmarked this.) GitForWindows has historically been compiled using mingw gcc - the legacy and now-mostly-obsolete mingw.org in the git 1.x timeframe (this is the reason there was not a 64 bit version of git.exe through that release channel at the time), and more recently the mingw-w64 compilers for git 2.x. Many of your questions are answered at https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/wiki/FAQ#what-is-the-relationship-between-git-for-windows-and-msysgit https://github.com/git-for-windows/build-extra#components-of-the-git-for-windows-sdk https://www.msys2.org Some components used by git (any shell scripts, for example) require some form of posix compatibility layer to function. The recent MinGit has a busybox-based variant that can mostly avoid MSYS2 dependencies, though it seems to have at least some small MSYS2 pieces remaining: https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/wiki/MinGit#experimental-busybox-based-mingit You can see exactly how the MSYS2 runtime used by GitForWindows differs from the version used by the MSYS2 project itself by looking at the git repo at https://github.com/git-for-windows/msys2-runtime/commits/master and how MSYS2 differs from upstream cygwin by looking at the repos at https://github.com/Alexpux/Cygwin/commits/msys2-master https://github.com/mirror/newlib-cygwin/commits/master https://github.com/mirror/newlib-cygwin/releases These "patch sets" tend to get rebased pretty frequently when new cygwin releases come out upstream. I dunno where else this history has been written down, but this is my understanding of the development heritage. Any git and/or MSYS2 maintainers can correct me if anything I stated here is incorrect. -Tony -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
