What is this MSys thing in MSysGit

MSys is an environment for Windows offering a Unix-type shell and a Perl interpreter. Because many parts of Git are still not builtins programmed in C, but instead shell and Perl scripts, Git for Windows needs such an environment.

Therefore we ship Git for Windows with a very minimal version of MSys.

MSys is also required to build Git, as we re-use the same Unix-type setup upstream Git uses. We ship a more complete MSys environment, including GCC, as build environment (which is therefore nick-named ''msysGit'').

We compile Git as a pure MinGW program, though, i.e. a program without any link-dependencies on anything but standard Windows libraries. So unless you need to use any parts of Git that are still implemented only as shell or Perl scripts, you can get away with running plain git.exe.