Is there lightweight git client for Windows? [closed]

Question

Is there lightweight git client for Windows ?

I installed TortoiseGit which has dependency on msysgit. msysgit installation is ~1.6GB which totaly blows my mind. I thought only Oracle can bloat software like that :)

Thanks!

Answer 1

Latest Git for Windows 1.7.10.x occupies 208M on my hard drive. The problem you're observing is that the software you're using to check the installed size does not honor NTFS hardlinks. For instance, if you would look at the libexec subdirectory using a recent version of FAR in its "File links" mode (Ctrl-9), you'll see most binaries there have 107 links as they all really link to one executable file.

The other problem is that this is Windows, and some bits of Git are implemented as Unix shell scripts or in Perl and its two standard GUI front-ends (git gui and gitk) are implemented in Tcl/Tk; in a typical GNU/Linux (or *BSD or whatever) system you'd have these dependent runtimes installed system-wide but Git for Windows is condemned to carry them with itself as there's no sane packaging system which it could rely upon.

There are attempts to do clear-room reimplementations such as libgit2 which could supposedly be used to implement a light-weight Git client, but all these attempts are seriously lacking in features compared with full-blown Git and will probably continue to do so because Git itself is evolving as well.

In short: I would just relax and proceed with Git for Windows. ;-)