I tried to build the 2.34.0 version on cygwin and received the following. I am using commit 7e27bd589d328b9da. the make utility is GNU Make 4.2.1 $ make prefix=/usr/local all html GIT_VERSION = 2.34.0.rc0.dirty GIT_VERSION = 2.34.0.rc0 GIT_VERSION = 2.34.0.rc0.dirty GIT_VERSION = 2.34.0.rc0 GIT_VERSION = 2.34.0.rc0.dirty GIT_VERSION = 2.34.0.rc0 I broke out of the build and and re-issued the make command at which point the code starts to build correctly. This is just an FYI.