Building Git from scratch on Snow Leopard

When you try to build Git from scratch on a Snow Leopard machine, you may have ran into the following problem:

$ git clone git://github.com/git/git.git
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/nvie/git/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 111619, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (28007/28007), done.
remote: Total 111619 (delta 82192), reused 111264 (delta 81852)
Receiving objects: 100% (111619/111619), 27.60 MiB | 531 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (82192/82192), done.
$ cd git
$ make prefix=/usr/local/bin/git
GIT_VERSION = 1.6.2.rc0.90.g0753
    * new build flags or prefix
    CC fast-import.o
    CC abspath.o
    :
    :
ld: warning: in /opt/local/lib/libexpat.dylib, file is not of required architecture
    ...
ld: symbol(s) not found
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

Then, you have a pretty big change you are having an old Darwin ports (macports) collection in use which has not yet been upgraded to Snow Leopard’s new x64 architecture.

There is, however, a simple solution to this, namely to have the git build ignore the Darwin ports, simply by adding the following parameter to the build:

$ make NO_DARWIN_PORTS=1 prefix=/usr/local/bin/git