Does TortoiseGit work with PortableGit-x.x.x.x-previewyyyyyy? What are compatible git versions for TortoiseGit?

git portability tortoisegit

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Solution 1

Original answer (Nov. 2011)

It depends on your Os (Win32 or 64), and on the combination of TortoiseGit and msysgit.
The latest versions of both should usually work together, but you can see some bugs still pending:

Issue 948: TortoiseProc crashes when repo contains huge files
Issue 875: TGitCache crash

Whenever you have a similar issue, report it on the bug list, and look for an intermediate build.
The very latest ones, for instance, supposed to fix the current crashes, are:

https://tortoisegit.org/download/

Update Nov. 2015: TortoiseGit works with git-for-windows (msys2) which replaces msysgit.

Both git-for-windows and GitHub Desktop now propose Git 2.5(+)
(GitHub Desktop includes Portable Git 2.5 since this morning)

Solution 2

TortoiseGit (as of 2.13) requires a command-line git.exe.

It works with a variety of different "git.exe providers". Known to work are:

Git for Windows 2.24+ (https://gitforwindows.org/, based on MSYS2; portable and installer are known to work; recommended; for Git for Windows >= 2.16 you need at least TortoiseGit 2.5.7; older versions of Git are not supported any more)
GitHub for Windows (includes Git for Windows (one from the two above, current versions include Git for Windows 2.x based on MSYS2)
Git of the Cygwin distribution (requires to activate a special hack, see https://stackoverflow.com/a/32427358/3906760 and https://tortoisegit.org/docs/tortoisegit/tgit-dug-settings.html; please note that Cygwin Git is kinda broken as it doesn't pass the Git test suite on Windows)
Git of the MSYS2 distribution (requires to activate a special hack, see https://tortoisegit.org/docs/tortoisegit/tgit-dug-settings.html; do not enable this hack for the Git for Windows package!)

You can mix x86 and x64 versions of Git.exe and TortoiseGit. However, x64 TortoiseGit will only run on x64 Windows, same for the 32-bit/x86 version of TortoiseGit which will only run on x86 Windows.

TortoiseGit tries to find a Git for Windows installation or tries to find a git.exe on the PATH environment variable. If git.exe is not on your PATH, you can also set the path to git.exe manually in TortoiseGit settings dialog on the general page.