Re: git on Cygwin: Not a valid object name HEAD

From: Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de>
Date: Aug 7, 2007, 19:41 UTC
Message-ID: <07BB2580-4406-496F-8ACE-F6A03D1687BE@zib.de>
In-Reply-To: <30e4a070708071042g5623cb7ak724a8b8e588bd1da@mail.gmail.com>

The discussion below basically leads to two questions:

Is there any chance that git can be ported to cygwin's textmode?

Is there any chance that patches would be accepted that try to do so? Even if they add "b" to fopen and O_BINARY to open, which both are useless on Unix?

Junio, Linus?

On Aug 7, 2007, at 7:42 PM, Mark Levedahl wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> On 8/7/07, Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de> wrote:
>>
>> My question is, is there any chance to handle the shell
>> activity by setting the right CYGWIN options?
>>
>
> See my other message: text mounts are best considered obsolescent if
> not deprecated, and that mode is definitely not actively developed.
> There are just too many loopholes with forks and pipes to reliably "do
> the right thing."

I read your message and I just checked the most recent installer of cygwin (screenshot attached).

I see three choices I'm offered:
1) the path to install;
2) install for all or just me;
3) choose the default text file type.

I wouldn't call that deprecated, not even obsolenscent. To me it looks, as if the installer offers me a real choice. Besides the default path (which I never changed) and the decision whether I install for all (which I would always do) I see a single real choice in this installer -- the text file type. That's far from deprecated. I am strongly convinced that many consider to choose DOS/text if it offers a benefit for them, for example if they want to run CVS in cygwin.

And if the option to choose is around today, a reasonable assumption is that cygwin installations in textmode will be around for another couple of years.

I was convinced that git supports Windows, at least in cygwin. I am no longer convinced. I would no longer call this Windows support -- not even in cygwin. The first four people I asked to test git on Windows came back to me and told me that something is broken. They didn't do anything wrong. They just used an option that cygwin offers them during installation -- not hidden, not deprecated, no indication that they shouldn't use this option. They or someone else may have made the choice years ago. Their first impression was: git doesn't work. One of them is now testing Mercurial. He explained me today: "well, git can't even clone its own development repo. I recognized that Mercurial is basically doing the same and it's working fine for me."

I'd really prefer if git handled textmode (or at least refuses to work if it detects textmode).

> Your suggested tests for non-binary mode mounts (properly #ifdef'd for
> Cygwin, possibly only enabled if specifically configured in) are a
> reasonable idea.

We could try to restrict that to git commands that have not proved to work with textmode.

	Steffen