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

From: Mark Levedahl <mlevedahl@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 8, 2007, 13:50 UTC
Message-ID: <30e4a070708080650j5de7ee92p4acd7e82de7d9dff@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <07BB2580-4406-496F-8ACE-F6A03D1687BE@zib.de>

On 8/7/07, Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

>
> 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.

Call it passively deprecated. there has been a lot of discussion about removing it, or at least hiding it behind the mount command and not offering it at all during installation. The objective of text mounts was noble, but it really is hard to automatically convert any occurrence of crlf->lf and lf->crlf everywhere it should be done but not where it should not be done. However, a lot of people use text mounts without trouble (or at least without complaining to the lists), so removing the option outright was thought too likely to cause an uproar. So, consider that Cygwin is taking the "let it rot, remove it later" approach. Anyone who has troubles is generally and not so gently encouraged to just use binary mounts. There are some known crlf problems, largely with bash/sh, pipes, forks, and redirection (of which git is a heavy user so git is a prime candidate to get into trouble) that are not being worked.

For instance, when working on git-bundle.sh, I got bit by crlf conversions corrupting packfiles sent through a pipe on a system with pure binary mounts and CYGWIN=binmode. The cure to that bug is *removing* auto-crlf conversion from Cygwin.

Mark