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I'm seeing some questions lately pertaining to "git bash" or "gitbash" and had to go look to see if this was something different from , and it seems that it is different. I learned more about it from an Atlassian Git bash tutorial and the Git for Windows page. It's summarized as:

Git Bash is a package that installs Bash, some common bash utilities, and Git on a Windows operating system.

and:

Git for Windows provides a BASH emulation used to run Git from the command line.

... respectively.

Assuming we consider them on-topic (previously: Cygwin and previously: WSL), is there a need for a new tag? If so, what should it be called, and what should the excerpt & wiki say about it?

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  • (The "git" in the title being an intentional "dialectal variant of 'get'").
    – Jeff Schaller Mod
    Nov 18, 2019 at 20:30
  • I wonder if the shell and tools are in any way different from, say, the ordinary bash shell and GNU toolset? If so, it may make sense to have a separate tag. It may also be a reason to have a separate gitbash tag if there is something else peculiar about the actual environment that "Git Bash" gives you that means that running everyday user tasks would be different from doing them on any other GNU system. WSL is different from this in that it's a "complete system" (AFAIK) with packages and whatnot, as is Cygwin.
    – Kusalananda Mod
    Nov 18, 2019 at 21:04
  • The differences b/w native and this version are discussed here - stackoverflow.com/questions/45034549/…
    – slm Mod
    Nov 20, 2019 at 1:38

1 Answer 1

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I think we don't. Git Bash is just a redistribution of MSYS2/MinGW. We already have tags for those, so we should just make a synonym for one of these. I suggest , since that's where the tools come from. I'd imagine that the non-MSYS, non-git-cli parts of Git Bash would be off-topic here.

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    Will the users who ask about this topic be familiar with the term "msys"? Is it a commonly used term?
    – terdon Mod
    Nov 19, 2019 at 9:23
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    @terdon not sure about that. It's like Ubuntu and Linux a bit - people might have heard of Ubuntu but have no idea what a Linux is. But inasmuch as any peculiarities of the platform necessitate the use of a tag, msys is the platform. A synonym should be enough, I think.
    – muru
    Nov 19, 2019 at 11:12
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    Yeah, I don't know the first thing about any of these either. I'm just thinking we should make sure the tag name is something the average user would think of. And, since I don't know anything about this thing, I can't judge what that would be :)
    – terdon Mod
    Nov 19, 2019 at 11:17
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    @terdon isn’t the whole point of synonyms that users can use them without thinking too much, and questions will still be categorised appropriately? This case is somewhat complicated because it’s the same underlying technology, but Git Bash users are largely unaware they’re using MSYS.
    – Stephen Kitt
    Nov 19, 2019 at 13:54

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