什么是Visual Studio“本地Git存储库”？

Question

In Visual Studio, in Team Explorer's "Manage Connections" panel I can see remote TFS servers, and an other part, called 'Local Git Repositories'.

However, if I run git --version in a cmd window, it looks like git is not installed on my machine.

Hence the question: What are those 'Local Git Repositories'?

Answer 1

Local Git repositories are those repositories that exist on your local drive but that are not connected to a remote TFS repository.

The way version control historically worked in Visual Studio is that everything went through TFS, since the TFVC (Team Foundation Version Control) was the way to do it from within Visual Studio. When they added support for Git, they had to accommodate that Git is not tied to TFS: It's perfectly fine that people have a repository somewhere on their local drive that may or may not be connected to any kind of remote repository. So Visual Studio needed a way to work with those.

That's what the “local Git repositories” are: Repositories you have, that Visual Studio does not have a special treatment for (like work item integration etc.).

Note that Visual Studio will still work with those repositories using their internal Git client. So you are not required to install Git yourself to use it from Visual Studio; and actually, if you want to use Git from the command line, you will have to install it yourself.