I’ve recently blogged about adding TLS support to Emacs 24.5 on Windows and improving git performance on Windows by installing an alternative git command line client. The reason I ended up investigating how to add SSL and TLS support to Emacs is that when I originally upgraded from the official git Windows client to the Git for Windows build, I ended up with non-working TLS support in Emacs.

The TLS issues only occur if you tell the git installer to add git and all supporting Unix utilities to the path, which is not the default setting for a git installation on Windows.

I’ve blogged about improving the performance of Git on Windows in the past and rightly labelled the suggested solution as a bad hack because it requires you to manually replace binaries that are part of the installation. For people who tend to use DVCSs from the command line, manually replacing binaries is unlikely to be a big deal but it’s clunky and should really be a wakeup call for some people to include a newer base system.

In a previous blog post I explained how you can substantially improve the performance of git on Windows updating the underlying SSH implementation. This performance improvement is very worthwhile in a standard Unix-style git setup where access to the git repository is done using ssh as the transport layer. For a regular development workstation, this update works fine as long as you keep remembering that you need to check and possibly update the ssh binaries after every git update.

Admittedly I’m  not the biggest fan of git - I prefer Mercurial - but we’re using it at work and it does a good job as a DVCS. However, we’re mostly a Windows shop and the out of the box performance of Git for Windows is anything but stellar when you are using ssh as the transport for git. That’s not too much bother with most of our repos but we have a couple of fairly big ones and clone performance with those matters.

The default installation of msysgit (aka the official git client for Windows) is unfortunately built without python support. There are understandable reasons as to why this is, starting with “where the heck do I find the various python versions on Windows”. For me the problem was that I needed git-p4 to extract some code history out of a Perforce repository and guess what, git-p4 is written in Python. Only solution for me was that I had to find a way to make this work short of throwing Linux in a VM just to get a git import going.