msysgit on windows -- what should I be aware of, if any?

You get bash regardless of which option you pick, the latter options just add methods for using Git outside it.

For the latter options, msysgit adds Windows builds of common Linux utilities to PATH. This includes find, kill and sort, as well as cp, ls, rm, and about 20-30 others.

The problem with the first 3 (and similar) is that they exist in both OSs and function differently in each.

Not a huge ordeal if you know which one you'll be using, but any applications developed expecting one and getting the other will surely throw a fit.

To prevent the conflict, while still having Git work as expected, you can create a simple batch script that adjusts PATH only for the session. (e.g., readygit.bat)

@echo offsetlocalset PATH=C:\Git\bin;%PATH%cmd

Adjust C:\Git\bin accordingly. But, just run this and use Git within the cmd.

With this, you can use install option 3 and safely remove C:\Git\bin from your system's PATH, removing any confusion for Windows apps without confusing Git.

I currently use a similar script with GnuWin apps, including find.

You may want to be aware that:

• All git commands are not still there. On MSysGit1.6.2 early March 2009: archimport, cvsexportcommit, cvsimport, cvsserver, filter-branch, instaweb, send-email, and shell.)

• Until MSysGit1.6.2, git-svn was not there (it is now).
  The problem was git-svn needed subversion's perl bindings, and you can only build them as dynamically loadable modules. And MSysGit had a perl version that did not support dynamically loadable modules.

• All details about MSysGit are best explained in their MSysGitHerald Github wiki

On windows (this is less of an issue on other systems, in my very humble opinion...), you must be VERY aware of crlf issues, and note that (Unless they've changed this in the very latest version of Git, which I believe they may have - or if you're using a very old version of Git), autocrlf is enabled by default, unlike all the other git installations.

Also note that unless you use the very latest version of msysgit, soon to be out this week if I recall correctly from the mailing list, your repository size can not be larger than 2GB, total.

Additionally, Windows is wierdly case insensitive but /sometimes/ case preserving - keep that in mind! (This does not confuse git neccessarily - but it can and does confuse the user of the git repo).

Finally, git is substantially slower on windows than it is on linux, although it is (in my limited experience) faster than the alternatives.

Now, regarding the path...

Unless I'm mistaken, you should be able to just ensure that the main git binary is in the path - and that binary should then take care of referencing the other git components... But I have not tested this.