MinGit

MinGit is Git for Windows Applications

Rationale

Git for Windows targets end users, and for a long time third-party applications that spawn git.exe in order to provide Git-specific functionality piggy-backed onto the end-user installation.

However, for third-party applications it can be quite important to target certain minimum Git versions, e.g. when features such as git reset --stdin are needed that were introduced only recently.

Bundling a complete portable Git for such cases may very well be overkill, as the applications that want to call Git usually do not require all of Git for Windows' functionality, especially not the interactive features including Git GUI and Git Bash.

Enter MinGit.

MinGit is an intentionally minimal, non-interactive distribution of Git for Windows, with third-party applications as its intended audience.

What is included in (or excluded from) MinGit?

MinGit bundles git.exe and supporting cast, with an eye on trying to keep the size as small as possible without breaking non-interactive Git usage. To reduce the size, MinGit excludes localized messages, interactive commands, help documents, executables that are not called by git.exe, and the likes.

As Tcl/Tk is only included in Git for Windows to support the Git GUI and gitk (both graphical, interactive components of Git), it is excluded from MinGit.

Further, a conscious decision was made to exclude Perl. It is a large contributor to Git for Windows' size, and only very few, non-essential functions of Git require it:

• git add -i (interactive, hence not needed)
• git send-email (highly unlikely that 3rd-party applications want to use that...)
• git relink (an old, old relic of the olden days before pack files, probably a good candidate for retirement to Git's own contrib/ folder)
• CVS/Subversion adapters

The only really contentious part of that list is the Subversion adapter, git svn. However, the space savings are substantial enough, and Subversion is no longer that prevalent enough, to ask third-party applications that do want to call git svn to bundle a full-fledged portable Git.