Switch to “Native Windows Secure Channel library” from “OpenSSL library” on Windows Git, without reinstalling?

Question

During the installation of Git on my Windows machine, I selected \"Use the OpenSSL library\" for HTTPS Transport backend.

I would like to switch to \"Native Windows

Answer 1

You can check out this thread from the Git for Windows maintainer:

Yes, it is possible, and you can find out how exactly it is done by inspecting the source code for the installer, which is at https://github.com/git-for-windows/build-extra in the installer/install.iss file (this file is also easily found by a git grep "Secure Channel").

The relevant part is when the installer tests for the GC_WinSSL option to do more interesting stuff than recording the user's choice:

if RdbCurlVariant[GC_WinSSL].Checked and (not
    ReplaceFile(BinDir+'curl-winssl\curl.exe',BinDir+'curl.exe') or not
    ReplaceFile(BinDir+'curl-winssl\libcurl-4.dll',BinDir+'libcurl-4.dll'))
then begin
            Log('Line {#__LINE__}: Replacing curl-openssl with curl-winssl failed.');
end;

(See https://github.com/git-for-windows/build-extra/blob/97c8294b584ae4b99059a1194a5eba24ee2ff1ab/installer/install.iss#L1774)

In other words, the installer will simply try to replace the curl.exe and libcurl-4.dll files in \mingw64\bin (or the 32-bit equivalent) by the files in \mingw64\curl-winssl.