git submodule and the libiconv-2.dll issue

September 27, 2011

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This post was originally published in the Rambling Labs Blog on September 27, 2011.

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Yesterday, I made a fresh install of the latest msysGit (which is 1.7.6 as of right now).

I usually set up my vim using the akitaonrails vimfiles. So last night I was trying to do as I usually do, clone the repository with git clone git://github.com/akitaonrails/vimfiles, and then cd into the just cloned repository and run git submodule update --init to get all the bundled plugins.

This last command failed miserably with a The program can't start because libiconv-2.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem message. This didn’t happen to me with version 1.7.4 from msysGit, which I had installed before I formatted my laptop’s drive.

And I’m like “Okay. Let’s look it up and include it in the path”. I opened up Search Everything and typed “libiconv-2” and it was located in the Git/bin folder which is not included in the path.

I couldn’t just include it, so I had to copy the dll to the Git/libexec/git-core folder in order to make it work.

I emailed the msysGit mailing list to report the bug. I’ll keep you updated if I know anything else, but for now just copy the dll to the Git/libexec/git-core folder and you’ll be fine.