Well for this one I can answer my own question (although I’m still interested if there is anyone out there willing and able to answer development questions!): they are being very literal when they say "download version 0.23x of libgit2 (at this point libgit2-0.23.4.zip is what you want as it has security patches backported). At version 24 there is an api change that breaks Fritzing (there is a new parameter that Fritzing isn’t supplying apparently). I still can’t get either version to run after I compile them but at least I can compile now. Once I get this worked out (assuming I do of course), I’ll post a how to here on how to do it as we need more folks helping to develop …
Peter