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Baoluo Wang
1,479 PointsWhy is git so unfriendly to Windows users?
It seems that all developers favors MAC...
2 Answers
Dino Paškvan
Courses Plus Student 44,108 PointsGit is not necessarily Mac-friendly. Git was developed by Linus Torvalds (the creator of the Linux kernel). It's developed on Linux, so primarily, it's Linux-friendly.
As such, it was ported to POSIX-compliant operating systems first, such as BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X.
Windows is not POSIX-compliant so getting many command-line tools from the *nix world to run on Windows is usually a hacky process. That's why many installations of command-line tools include Cygwin and/or special shells to make the software run as good as possible on Windows.
So, Git is really Mac-friendly only by chance, as the core of OS X is Darwin — a Unix-like OS.
James Barnett
39,199 Points> Windows is not POSIX-compliant
It's a little more complicated than that.
While it's true that OS X is POSIX-compliant, it's not technically correct to say that BSD-based or Linux-based distributions are POSIX-compliant.
Windows 7 is POSIX-complicant if you activate the Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) feature.
I'm not suggesting installing SUA will make a Windows 7 box git-friendly. I'm suggesting that there's a difference between being Unix-like and being POSIX-compliant.
> Git is really Mac-friendly only by chance, as the core of OS X is Darwin — a Unix-like OS.
This conclusion is spot on.
Dino Paškvan
Courses Plus Student 44,108 PointsI stand corrected. I admit, I was oversimplifying things a bit. I know of SUA's existence, but its purpose is something that's (mostly) over my head.
The OS-friendliness of Git is more or less a combination of (mostly) POSIX-compliance and Unix-likeness. (This statement is a guess as I've never really taken the time to look through the source code of Git.)
And finally, Git isn't even really human-friendly and that's by design. :)