I had an IRC conversation with Johannes saying I didn't know Git For Windows builds perfectly well for Linux, this just isn't advertised in the ANNOUNCE E-Mails, so I hadn't tried. Johannes doesn't build his own tarballs, but these are provided at: https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/tags diffing https://github.com/git/git/tags v.s. what Junio releases shows: $ diff -ru git-2.19.0 git-2.19.0.gh Only in git-2.19.0: configure Only in git-2.19.0/git-gui: version Only in git-2.19.0: version So to use these you need to grab the GitHub tarball, create a "version" file saying e.g. 2.19.0.windows.1 or whatever it is (derived from the name of the tarball), and if applicable make your own configure script. GFW is a "friendly fork", but a permanent one it seems. The diff between it and 2.19.0 proper is ~10k lines, and e.g. this last release had experimental stash/rebase in C that 2.19.0 didn't. So it would be great if this were packaged up by linux distro as some "alterate" package of git. I'm putting Jonathan in the "To" line because I'm mainly interested in this for Debian, but maybe there's wider interest at git-packagers...