Use Cygwin or msysGit version of Git, or both?

Question

I am running Windows 7, I just installed Cygwin for the first time today so I have been playing around with it. I am now wanting to start using Git as well.

From wha

Answer 1

You can use either or both -- but there are some things to watch out for.

At my most recent job, most of the team was using msysGit; I used Cygwin git because I'm a heavy Cygwin user anyway.

The two treat execute permissions differently. When you checkout a foo.cmd or foo.bat file in the MSYS environment, it treats it as executable because the .cmd or .bat suffix denotes an executable format. Cygwin doesn't; it's a Unix-like environment, so it doesn't assume that a file is executable based on its suffix. So the *.cmd files were working fine for everyone else, but not for me.

The workaround was to do a chmod +x and check in and push the change, which made the files executable for me and didn't affect other users.

I also ran into some problems with entering passwords when doing push, pull, or fetch; the code in git that turns off echoing works under MSYS, but not under Cygwin. I was able to avoid that by using passwordless ssh.

Apart from that (and perhaps one or two other issues that I'm not remembering at the moment), things went reasonably smoothly.