| Mike DePaulo on 5 Nov 2015 20:58:03 -0800 |
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| [PLUG] Cygwin and Git for Windows |
Hi Andrew, I am catching up on email threads related to my existing 3 PLUG talks (Cygwin, Fedora and X2Go.) You sent the email below in reply to this thread: Re: [PLUG] Cygwin preso and related discussion The presentation was on 2015-10-13 at PLUG north. The simple answer is that "Git for Windows" is "msysGit", which as its name implies, is based on MSYS or MSYS2. MSYS and MSYS2 that provide the shell and tools that you enjoy using. They are both forks of Cygwin. The terminal emulator is mintty 2.0.x. Cygwin uses it also: https://code.google.com/p/mintty/ The long answer: Actually, the git.exe is a native windows executable, but it comes with those tools and the shell, which are MSYS or MSYS2. msysGit 1.x is based on MSYS, which is forked from an ancient version of the Cygwin DLL (1.3.3, from 2001!). MSYS is nearly abandoned and is part of the original MinGW suite, which is also nearly abandoned. msysGit 2.x is based on MSYS2, which is forked from a recent version of Cygwin and tracks upstream Cygwin closely. MSYS2 is a healthy project and it is part of the MinGW-w64 suite (for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows), which is also a healthy project. Note that the original use case of both MSYS and MSYS2 is to enable compiling software with MinGW / MinGW-w64. These are ports of GCC and the rest of the GNU toolchain to windows, and as such, rely on on tools like a unix-like shell. Git for Windows's huge jump from 1.9 to 2.3 happened in April 2015. MSYS and MSYS2 made numerous changes to Cygwin's codebase. I am not an expert on those changes. My limited understanding is that they made the shell and utilities more user-friendly for Windows users, but at the expense of posix compatibility and real-world compatibility with many source packages in the Cygwin distribution (and in Linux distributions.) You want to run the full-featured GNOME or MATE desktop environments on Cygwin/X, right? Well I assume that would not be possible with MSYS2. It definitely would not be possible with the original MSYS! See slide 10 in my 2015-10-13 talk. It's a perfect example of the awkward relationship between Cygwin, MSYS, MSYS2, msysGit, and Microsoft: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2L_OrCln9ShdEo2UXRPckIxQ2s -Mike On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 3:43 PM, Andrew Libby <alibby@xforty.com> wrote: > > FWIW, whatever installs with git on windows with the standard > git distribution is pretty nice. I don't do a ton on windows, > but when I need to look at log files, or copy files, scp, and > so on it's really convenient to have the shell and set of > unix tools git provides. > > I couldn't quickly figure it out by looking at git-scm.com, anyone > know what they ship with? > > Andy > > > On 10/16/15 3:33 PM, JP Vossen wrote: >> Thanks to Michael DePaolo for the great Cygwin talk the other night. I >> haven't been forced to use Windows in a while and thus haven't needed >> it, but it was great to see how much it has improved! >> >> I personally have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Cygwin, because >> as Michael said it's a bit of a mish-mash of Linux and Windows, so it's >> not quite fully either, and that can get ugly. Still, it's a HECK of a >> lot better than being stuck with just Windows cmd.exe and it is an >> awesome thing with the right mind-set and context. >> >> That said, sometimes it can be over-kill, and there are some other >> alternatives like the gnuwin32 and Unxutils ports. I've talked about >> them before with some other related tools: >> http://lists.netisland.net/archives/plug/plug-2007-09/msg00280.html >> http://lists.netisland.net/archives/plug/plug-2009-05/msg00063.html >> http://lists.netisland.net/archives/plug/plug-2010-03/msg00028.html >> >> And I also have some aging sections about it here: >> http://www.jpsdomain.org/windows/winshell.html >> http://www.jpsdomain.org/windows/win-tools.html >> >> Hopefully these tools will be helpful for those stuck using Windows. :-) >> JP >> ----------------------------|:::======|------------------------------- >> JP Vossen, CISSP |:::======| http://bashcookbook.com/ >> My Account, My Opinions |=========| http://www.jpsdomain.org/ >> ----------------------------|=========|------------------------------- >> "Microsoft Tax" = the additional hardware & yearly fees for the add-on >> software required to protect Windows from its own poorly designed and >> implemented self, while the overhead incidentally flattens Moore's Law. >> ___________________________________________________________________________ >> Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org >> Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce >> General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug >> > > -- > Andrew Libby > alibby@xforty.com > 484-887-7505 x 1115 > http://xforty.com > http://www.kineticweb.com/ > http://zugunroute.com > ___________________________________________________________________________ > Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org > Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce > General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug ___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug