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I already have Cygwin installed on my workstations and I wondering if and why I would want to install Git for Windows (MSysGit) instead of the Git cygwin package? I can imagine that there might be issues with multiple versions of the "Cygwin" DLL on the system.

I'm looking for people that have used both and can provide insight into any issues they've had with running both environments on a system, or issues using the Git package included in Cygwin for day to day use. Again, I'm not asking which is better or "You should use MSysGit because cygwin is bloated!", etc. Also, I'm not going to be using BASH or MinTTY as my terminal, I'll be using PowerShell and to which I will have added the BIN cygwin directory to Windows's PATH enviornment.

Julian Easterling
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  • If you're going to be using Power Shell anyways, why do you want to bother with Cygwin? The Git package distributed with Cygwin is ancient (currently 1.7.9) compared to the much more up-to-date msysgit distribution. –  Sep 06 '13 at 22:24
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    I use Cygwin for SSH, NetCat, and various other "Unix/Linux" command line tools which I do "execute" from a powershell prompt. While having a newer version (1.8.2 vs. 1.7.9) is compelling, I'm not sure that that alone is enough to "not" use the Cygwin version... (It is a strong reason though if there are not other issues to running multiple Cygwin DLLs on the same system. – Julian Easterling Sep 07 '13 at 21:06

1 Answers1

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The two can coexist without issue.

Msysgit is generally faster and more recent though, and don't necessitate the huge Cygwin setup (just to get git).
And it works fine with Powershell (as in posh-git).
See also:

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VonC
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  • Like I said in the original question, I already have Cygwin installed for other reason, so my question is more of why would I want to install Git for Windows (from MSYSGit) instead of using the Cygwin packaged Git... – Julian Easterling Sep 07 '13 at 21:10
  • @JulianEasterling I don't know. I use Gnu on Windows (https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki) for all my unix commands, without having to use Cygwin at all. That way, I can benefit from a more recent git version than the one proposed by Cygwin, install a more recent gpg2 (which comes with its own agent), and encrypt all my credentials in `%HOME%/_netrc.gpg`, as in http://stackoverflow.com/a/18607931/6309. When it comes to pure git feature, msysgit is simply more up-to-date and complete. – VonC Sep 07 '13 at 23:22
  • Unfortunately, we can go back and forth on which one is better and which one is smaller... In the age of multi-terabyte drives I don't really care if one is 18MB while the other is 100MB. I care more about compatibility when using the tools. I also work on Linux servers so I don't want two sets of commands/arguments/switches to remember when I need to get my work done. "This tool is better" is not what I'm not trying to get with this question as it is nothing more than an opinion. I use SSH to push to GitHub so encrypting my credentials is not a benefit in this situation. – Julian Easterling Sep 09 '13 at 13:25
  • @JulianEasterling Unless you *really* have a specifc unix-like use which *requires* Cygwin, you simply don't need it for git operations, ssh or https. It is that simple. All unix commands are available on Windows. And ssh works just fine: http://stackoverflow.com/a/18679161/6309. – VonC Sep 09 '13 at 13:28