Re: [PATCH v2 1/7] gitlab-ci: speed up installation of Git for Windows SDK

[Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>]

On Mon, Nov 09, 2026 at 08:53:53AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> writes:
> 
> > +tar -xf git-sdk.zip -C $directory
> 
> Wow.  You learn new things every day.

Yeah, it's fun. Windows uses bsdtar, which is in turn based on
libarchive, and hence it also supports ZIP and 7zip files [1].

> This is in ci/install-sdk.ps1 file.  Right now that script is
> referred to only from .gitlab-ci.yml so as long as GitLab CI
> environment has tar that works this way we would be fine, but I
> thought that ci/* was designed to be portable across CI and other
> environments.  At least we would want a comment next to it that says
> we assume BSD derived tar that can grok zip archives here, probably?

Well, bsdtar is nowadays distributed with Windows by default, so this
should be portable to other CI environments, too. So I don't think it
really warrants a comment as it should just work everwhere. That's
certainly something to point out in the commit message though.

In fact I wonder whether we should maybe adapt GitHub Workflows to use
that script, too. That was my intent back when introducing this script,
and for a brief time we in fact did that. But we eventually figured that
it was too slow in contrast to the
git-for-windows/setup-git-for-windows-sdk step, so we reverted that
change on GitHub again in 55d62306eea (GitHub ci(windows): speed up
initializing Git for Windows' minimal SDK again, 2024-12-17).

But now that we have found a way to remove the slowness we could unify
both systems again. I intentionally left that out of this patch series
though, as we can still do that as a subsequent step if we want to. In
any case, I want Johannes' opinion on this topic before doing such a
change.

Patrick

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/tar/