threads / discuss / 15418

What's the status of MinGW port.

Subject: What's the status of MinGW port.

## tl;dr

6 messages between Sep 8, 2008 and Sep 8, 2008.

replies: 5people: 5as markdown or json

Kevin Yu· Sep 8, 2008, 04:34 UTC · lore

Hi,
      GIT is a great tool, but I'm running Windows XP.
      It seems like msysgit hasn't been updated for a long time,
neither has the mingw.git branch.
      Is there any plan to create a native version of GIT on MS Windows?

      Anyway GIT is great. :).

Best wishes.

                                                 Kevin

Johannes Sixt· Sep 8, 2008, 07:08 UTC · re: Kevin Yu · lore

Re: What's the status of MinGW port.

Kevin Yu schrieb:

>       GIT is a great tool, but I'm running Windows XP.
>       It seems like msysgit hasn't been updated for a long time,
> neither has the mingw.git branch.
>       Is there any plan to create a native version of GIT on MS Windows?

There are no plans anymore to create such a thing.

It is already there: http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/

If the lack of activity is worrysome to you, you could help create a release tarball for 1.6.0(.x).

-- Hannes

Tait· Sep 8, 2008, 11:03 UTC · re: Johannes Sixt · lore

Re: What's the status of MinGW port.

> >       Is there any plan to create a native version of GIT on MS Windows?
> 
> There are no plans anymore to create such a thing.

Out of curiosity, any particular reason why not?

Andreas Ericsson· Sep 8, 2008, 11:24 UTC · re: Tait · lore

Re: What's the status of MinGW port.

Tait wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

>>>       Is there any plan to create a native version of GIT on MS Windows?
>> There are no plans anymore to create such a thing.
> 
> Out of curiosity, any particular reason why not?
>

He mentioned it in the very next sentence: It already exists.

I guess this is beyond your attention span, but I'll say it anyway; Please read the entire email before responding. You'll save yourself a lot of embarrassment that way.

-- 
Andreas Ericsson                   andreas.ericsson@op5.se
OP5 AB                             www.op5.se
Tel: +46 8-230225                  Fax: +46 8-230231

Tait· Sep 8, 2008, 18:18 UTC · re: Andreas Ericsson · lore

Re: What's the status of MinGW port.

Show 8 quoted lines

>>>>      Is there any plan to create a native version of GIT on MS Windows?
>>>There are no plans anymore to create such a thing.
>>
>>Out of curiosity, any particular reason why not?
>
> He mentioned it in the very next sentence: It already exists.
>
> I guess this is beyond your attention span...

The personal attack was unnecessary, and no, I'm not inattentive, thank you.

My understanding is that MinGW is a POSIX emulation layer; the underlying code is still using POSIX functions like fork and exec that aren't native to Windows. When I said "native" I meant "not POSIX" -- i.e. using the Windows API directly instead of through some kind of munging layer.

So I'll ask again, is there any particular reason why a _native_ Windows Git hasn't been attempted (or was abandoned, or whatever)?

Peter Harris· Sep 8, 2008, 18:30 UTC · re: Tait · lore

Re: What's the status of MinGW port.

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Tait wrote:

> My understanding is that MinGW is a POSIX emulation layer; the underlying
> code is still using POSIX functions like fork and exec that aren't native
> to Windows.

Your understanding is flawed. You're probably thinking of MSYS or CYGWIN. MinGW is a native Win32 port of gcc.

> So I'll ask again, is there any particular reason why a _native_ Windows
> Git hasn't been attempted (or was abandoned, or whatever)?

MinGW-git is a native Windows application.

Some of the utilities bundled with "msysgit" (eg. bash, rxvt, perl, and therefore git-svn) use the MSYS POSIX emulation layer, but the git core is native.

Peter Harris