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Differences between MinGW from msysgit (aka Git on Windows) and MinGW from MinGW.org

I installed msysgit through the network installer. I ended up with almost 2 gig of material, where I have among other sources git and MinGW.

I have three questions

  • I already had MinGW from MinGW.org. Now I think I can remove the latter and stay with the msysgit distribution. In any case, MinGW from MinGW.org comes with mingw-get , which can be used to manage MinGW packages. How can I determine the packages that come with msysgit? or, in another way (given the sheer size of msysgit), which packages are left out?

  • Given the overall size and since git is built, which folders can be safely deleted without compromising the normal use of git? This suggests that I don't need to build git again.

  • And finally, should this version be considered portable? If not, what are the installed registry keys or environment variables?

Essentially, I need help deciding whether to use a small portable git and install symbolic links to MinGW, or to use the huge all-in-one distribution kit and remove the good old MinGW.org.

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Well, there are a few misconceptions. Let them get them out of the way first:

  • The Unix shell you are talking about is called MSYS. It was originally developed by MinGW.org as a fork of Cygwin. This, in turn, was increased to improve slightly so that git can work with it, which became msysgit. Note that git binaries are native Win32 programs, but it requires a POSIX shell to work.

  • MinGW.org provides an installer / command line installation tool called mingw-get . It can be launched from MSYS (and I also think that cmd).

Now, to answer your question:

  • I would say that msysgit provides the minimum number of packages required for fully functional git. A lot of git goes through the shell, so you need a lot of utilities. I'm not sure about that though.

  • Why are you building git? It sounds like an ugly effort. I suggest looking below to better use git and MinGW and the shell together.

  • MSYS is quite portable, although you may need to restart the postinstallation script if you move around. By default, msysgit places its ssh keys in your Windows user folder, and not in the MSYS tree, so don't lose them.

Finally, to avoid all these problems and help improve your tuning with a significant factor (some random quality quality): use MSYS2 . What is MSYS2? This is a modern fork of the current Cygwin, corrected to act like MSYS (with all the translation text), integrated with the package manager, which is really useful, and the MinGW-w64 tools. To summarize: MSYS2 is better, better, and better than everything you have now. Note that you can install a ton of MinWG-w64 libraries without creating them yourself. You can also install git, although the MSYS2 package is not

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