Git for Mac fails to launch: “illegal instruction”

Question

...I've looked pretty carefully (I believe), and have been unsuccessful at getting an installation of Git for my Mac.

For various reasons, I'm running 10.6.8 of Mac OS X and will not be changing that anytime soon.

I've already gathered and installed the bundle exposed here:

https://help.github.com/articles/set-up-git

The installation instructions are pretty clear, and it's obvious to me that the package installed. But any attempts to use the git client from the command line result in an "Illegal Instruction" error.

I've sifted pretty carefully through information available here:

http://git-scm.com/book/en/Getting-Started-Installing-Git

There is another bundle that seems to be available. It is called "GitHub for Mac 1.7.5, but it appears to require Mac OS X 10.7 or later.

Has anyone else encountered this difficulty? Must I build from source?

I'm a couple of hours of reading and hacking into this effort? Is there something obvious that I've not considered?

Answer 1

Yes, I've had the same exact problem, and what I did is installed an earlier build from here: https://code.google.com/p/git-osx-installer/

I'm running 10.6.8 and installed the newest build there, 1.8.4.2

SourceForge only has 1.9.0 and 1.8.5.2 http://sourceforge.net/projects/git-osx-installer/reviews?source=navbar

Someone on the reviews said they had trouble with both and went back to 1.7. I would try that if 1.8.4.2 doesn't work.

I was able to run the config commands without an illegal instruction error, at least.