I installed msysgit on my Windows 7 laptop so I could use TortoiseGIT on it.
At first I just installed the msysgit normally (Full Installer) and the TortoiseGIT. In tortoiseGIT configurations I couldn't set it up to work properly because I couldn't finde the git.exe file.
After some search I found out that I needed to run the initialize.sh script on the msysgit console mode. So i finally got the git.exe under bin folder in the msysgit.
The msysgit folder is something around 1.46 GB, and I realized that tis process downloaded the entire git source code. In linux, the git-core debian package is much smaller and the process is much quickier.
I was wondering, is that really it? It's really this big?
Some info on versioning:
msysgit: 1.7.8-preview20111206 git: 1.7.8 tortoiseGIT: 1.7.6.0
My MSysGit installation directory is under 80MB and I've put a bunch of additional tools in there. I suspect you've downloaded the development package (for working on MSysGit itself) rather than the package for if you just want to use git, which is Git For Windows.