Git on Windows 7

12 Jan 2009

I use Git everyday, whether it be for IronRuby, AgDLR, or random other Rails/Ruby work. Being that I work at Microsoft, I got my hands on earlier build of Windows 7 during the fall. Unfortuantely, git didn’t work fully on Windows 7, failing whenever a merge happened, which made push fail, as well as pull when trying to get other people’s changes). Jim Deville has been tracking this with the Windows team, and even bringing it up to the msysgit maintainer to see if there’s any way around this. It was looking grim, so I left my main development machine on Vista, and was sad.

Windows 7 Beta was released this past Friday, and I managed to download the .iso, get a Product Key, etc, at home during the day on Saturday. Now that it’s released, I’m guessing other people will have this problem ...

I’m not sure of the specific details behind the issue, but msysgit calls into C:\windows\system32\msvcrt.dll during a merge, and the changes to that DLL in Windows 7 breaks msysgit. Last week, John Lam was describing the issue to John Messerly, and realized that the easiest fix would be to copy the Windows Vista msvcrt.dll to the C:\Program Files\Git\bin directory, since Windows DLL resolution will look on the PATH, and “.” is included.

Curt Hagenlocher just reminded me of the fix, and it works!

gitwin7

Pretty awesome. Enjoy Git in Windows 7!

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