Re: [PATCH 07/14] Fix BASIC_LDFLAGS and COMPAT_CFLAGS for 64bit MinGW-w64

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Oct 11, 2014, 09:11 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.00.1410111045100.990@s15462909.onlinehome-server.info>
In-Reply-To: <CAOYw7dtSdR8GVYK2YrVjgQ7ZRExHjPBLCNQk7vchV66fx27xBw@mail.gmail.com>

Hi Ray,

On Fri, 10 Oct 2014, Ray Donnelly wrote:

> what's the difference between https://github.com/msysgit/git and
> https://github.com/git-for-windows/git ? I noticed that your fork is
> forked from msysgit, not git-for-windows?

I am glad you asked!

Git for Windows was developed using the development environment called "msysGit" ever since 2007. Unfortunately the name caused a *real* lot of confusion, not only because some people wondered what the heck MSys is, but those who did not wonder mistook it for a *different* version of Git for Windows.

Apart from the name, msysGit also has the shortcoming of abusing Git to deploy binaries. In other words, msysGit itself is a Git-managed project that delivers the complete development environment. Upgrading individual components is unnecessarily hard, but msysGit's way was necessary because there was no nice package manager for MinGW/MSys yet.

Things have changed in the meantime, and pushed forward by Thomas Braun and Sebastian Schuberth, we now have a light-weight Git for Windows SDK – which is essentially a standard MinGW/MSys system managed through the package manager mingw-get. The only two add-ons we have is a nicer installer (that Sebastian offered to MinGW but they declined) and the addition of our own mingw-get'able packages (such as openssl, libpcre, and git itself).

Needless to say, I am a big fan of that new strategy. This is why we decided to just phase out the name "msysGit" (as well as the GitHub org of the same name) and work on Git for Windows (with the corresponding GitHub org, and using the name "Git for Windows" for the installer aimed at "end-users" and "Git for Windows SDK" for the development environment targeting Git for Windows developers).

I also added this writeup to the FAQ on the msysGit wiki: https://github.com/msysgit/msysgit/wiki/Relationship-to-Git-for-Windows

Ciao, Johannes

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