A.2.5 I am using OS X and SOMETHING works in shell, but not in Magit

This usually occurs because Emacs doesn’t have the same environment variables as your shell. Try installing and configuring https://github.com/purcell/exec-path-from-shell. By default it synchronizes $PATH, which helps Magit find the same git as the one you are using on the shell.

If SOMETHING is "passphrase caching with gpg-agent for commit and/or tag signing", then you’ll also need to synchronize $GPG_AGENT_INFO.