Ask HN: How is Git on Windows today? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How is Git on Windows today?

#21

Post by jcsalterego » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 3:34 AM UTC

barrydahlberg wrote: post #15

jcsalterego wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - I run everything through the bash shell which works fine but is a pain to connect to Windows batch files. This makes automation harder than required. What are you using bash or batch files for? Have you tried PowerShell as a replacement for batch files?

My scripts are mostly trivial so far. PowerShell is awesome but it's another thing I haven't had time to learn enough about to use effectively. I actually have a C# console app as my build script because I can write things there so much faster than anywhere else. It makes calls to Windows and the occasional batch / bash script.

The built-in IDE for PowerShell 2.0 is pretty good from what I recall, but I tend to just stay with the good ole blue console.

`Get-Help` and `Get-Member` are great discovery tools -- pipe anything to it, or do `Get-Member -inputObject $foo` and get all its properties.

Re: Ask HN: How is Git on Windows today?

#22

Post by zorander » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 4:34 AM UTC

I've been using it daily for over three years on cygwin. If you don't depend on case-sensitive paths and don't have symlinks in your repository, it's great. I use it for work and for personal stuff, and I have zero desire to find a new tool.

Git is, given its heritage, heavily optimized for unix-style (especially linux) vfs implementations, so it is slower on windows than it is on osx or linux, however even with a fairly sizeable repository it's completely usable. It's not noticeably slower than the alternatives on windows and it's generally much faster on unix.

Go for it.

Re: Ask HN: How is Git on Windows today?

#23

Post by zbanks » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 4:35 AM UTC

mullr wrote: post #19

msysgit is quite good, provided you turn off linefeed conversion. I wrote about some ways to make it easier for day to day use, if you're interested: http://mullr.wordpress.com/2010/06/01/configuring-msysgit-fo... Avoid cygwin git; it appears to work at first, but it gets very slow when you deal with large repositories. None of the end-to-end GUIs I've used (I've tried about 5) do a respectable job. They all try to l…

Why should one turn off linefeed conversion?

I've used git on windows very briefly in the past, using this feature, and it seemed pretty nice. I'm planning on having some window-based coworkers use git soon, and does this really become a big problem?

Re: Ask HN: How is Git on Windows today?

#24

Post by mullr » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 4:53 AM UTC

zbanks wrote: post #23

mullr wrote: post #19

msysgit is quite good, provided you turn off linefeed conversion. I wrote about some ways to make it easier for day to day use, if you're interested: http://mullr.wordpress.com/2010/06/01/configuring-msysgit-fo... Avoid cygwin git; it appears to work at first, but it gets very slow when you deal with large repositories. None of the end-to-end GUIs I've used (I've tried about 5) do a respectable job. They all try to l…

Why should one turn off linefeed conversion? I've used git on windows very briefly in the past, using this feature, and it seemed pretty nice. I'm planning on having some window-based coworkers use git soon, and does this really become a big problem?

In my experience, it tends to get confused and intermittently forget what it's doing. When this happens, it thinks that all your files are modified. This is very distressing. The workaround, which works great for single-platform teams, is to just turn off linefeed conversion altogether. The problem may very well have been fixed, but I still do it.

Re: Ask HN: How is Git on Windows today?

#25

Post by suraj » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 5:13 AM UTC

I have been keeping tabs on TortoiseGit and it has become a lot more usable. I usually shy away from command line on windows and my git usage on windows is very light. TortoiseGit seems sufficient for day to day activities not involving any git magic.

For setting up a git server on windows please check out gerrit ( http://code.google.com/p/gerrit ). It is a pure Java implementation so should work reasonably well on Windows.

Re: Ask HN: How is Git on Windows today?

#26

Post by mkramlich » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 6:14 AM UTC

It is so easy to rent a Linux server these days that I suspect the only reason someone is "required" to run it on a Windows server is because, well, they don't have a good reason, just corporate-bureaucratic IT bullshit.

Re: Ask HN: How is Git on Windows today?

#27

Post by dmethvin » Fri, Oct 29, 2010, 1:35 PM UTC

johnsto19 wrote: post #7

dmethvin wrote: post #6

Do the devs already know git, or will it be a new experience for them? No matter what tool(s) you use, learning to use git effectively will be the hardest part. I use TortoiseGit integrated into Windows Explorer for most stuff, and drop down to the command line in the odd situation where it's needed. I can't give much feedback about the server side, I'm using GitHub.

I am pleased to see TortoiseGit, does it have any big issues? I remember hearing about it a while ago being very "beta" software.

TortoiseGit has been working fine for me, no crashes or problems. They've done a pretty good job of taking the most common scenarios and making them easy to do, even for a Windows user. (And I say that as a Windows user:)