Building Git

We build Git for Windows using MSys2.

As we are in the process of switching away from msysGit as our development environment, the following instructions are a little rough on the edges. This situation should become better over the next months.

Installing a build environment

1. Install MSys2 from https://msys2.github.io/, into C:/msys32 and C:/msys64 (if you only want to build for one architecture, you can skip the other one). This will install three Shells into the Start Menu: the MSys, the MinGW 32 and the MinGW 64 Shell. To build Git, you should start the MinGW shell corresponding to the architecture of the installed MSys2.

2. Download setup-git-sdk.bat and put it in the the top-level MSys2 directory. Then run the setup-git-sdk.bat in a cmd window (you need to close all MSys2 windows before that, so that the msys-2.0.dll file can be updated). The setup-git-sdk.bat updates the msys2-runtime and will install the git build dependencies via pacman.

Build Git

1. Open your corresponding MinGW Shell

2. Clone Git: cd /usr/src/ && git clone https://github.com/git-for-windows/git.

3. Build Git: make.

4. Run the test suite: make test

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Note: if you encounter messages like 39 [main] make 7628 child_info_fork::abort:... while running make, follow the following MSYS2 Issue post, in short: close all MSys2 windows and run the autorebase.bat script in the top-level MSys2 directory from a cmd.

Build the msys2-⁠runtime

1. Install the MSys2 Toolchain: pacman -⁠S gcc binutils make.

2. Clone the MSYS2-packages repository: cd /usr/src && git clone https://github.com/git-for-windows/MSYS2-packages.

3. Temporarily: In MSYS2-packages, check out the msys-runtime branch: git remote add -f dscho https://github.com/dscho/MSYS2-packages && git checkout -t dscho/msys-runtime.

4. Build the package: makepkg -⁠s.

(You might need to call pacman -S ca-certificates to reinstall that package, it seems that it was not installed properly at least in one MSys2 32-bit setup.)