Building a Git Client 1.8.2 on Apple iMac PPC OSX 10.5.8

Preview

My aging Apple iMac has a G7450 PPC chipset. It has seen many developer wars from years gone by, and still it does frequent battle with software developed solely for the Intel world of Apple.

Now

As my current efforts revolve around learning Git tooling, it became apparent that very old versions of Git clients would not offer the new features we need when developing and packaging code. This forced me to pull out my 20 year old notes on how to code and compile in the C programming language. Ug! It’s like reliving a nightmare – now i remember why i learned cobol, rpg and java !

Rescue

A bit of googling found this link from shiningthrough.co.uk which gives us a clear set of instructions to build the latest git client from C source code. You’ll need an Apple with a PPC chipset ( if you are using an Intel chipset, this post is not for you! ), a C compiler (mine came with the Apple development tool Xcode), the C source code, a bunch of free disk space, patience, and luck.

Git Client

To build a recent version of the git client, here is an overview of the steps we’ll follow :

1. Download a recent version of the Git client from here. This is for version 1.8.2.tar.gz or you can choose a later version if you must.
2. Open a command terminal
3. Unpack / unzip the downloaded archive
4. Change to the directory where you downloaded the C source code from above
5. Compile the source code
6. Install the compiled program
7. Test

Terminal Commands

From your terminal command line, do these steps :

Get source code as above

cd ~/Downloads
tar -xjf git-1.8.2.tar.gz
cd git-1.8.2
make prefix=/usr/local
sudo make prefix=/usr/local install

// after you restart your system / or at least logon again as your user

git –version

// you should see something like this:
iMac:git-1.8.2 jim$ ./git -version
Unknown option: -version
usage: git [–version] [–help] [-c name=value]
           [–exec-path[=<path>]] [–html-path] [–man-path] [–info-path]
           [-p|–paginate|–no-pager] [–no-replace-objects] [–bare]
           [–git-dir=<path>] [–work-tree=<path>] [–namespace=<name>]
           <command> [<args>]
iMac:git-1.8.2 jim$ ./git –version
git version 1.8.2