Does using msysgit lead to repository corruption?

Question

While stumbling through the chromium code documentation, I came across this post:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/UsingGit#Windows

If you are using msysgit, you are asking for trouble. Using both msysgit (including TortoiseGit) and cygwin's version of git is a path to lead to repository corruption so it's safer to stick with the cygwin's version. So if you still have msysgit in your PATH, you are on your own.

Does this really happen? What causes the corruption?

Answer 1

It depends when the warning was written, but further down the paragraph it suggests:

Be sure to turn off git's crlf munging:

git config --global core.autocrlf false

My guess it that it's a combination of line-ending conversion problems and msysgit not being stable when that bit of documentation was written. However, having myself only ever used git-svn to do an import from SVN to Git, and not two-way collaboration, it's possible that the warning is still valid.

Answer 2

I saw msysgit corrupt two Chromium checkouts in early 2009. I think that's roughly when this caveat was written. It seemed that git-svn support was immature at that point in time. I've avoided msysgit since then -- a real shame, because it's 4x-5x faster. Maybe things are better now?