[PATCH 0/4] Cygwin MSVC patches

Hi Junio,

I've had these patches "hanging around" in my queue, for a few weeks, with every intention of adding several more to fix up some problems... Hmm, well I haven't got to those yet, so I thought I may as well pass these on.

[PATCH 1/4] MSVC: Fix an "unresolved symbol" linker error on cygwin [PATCH 2/4] Makefile: merge two Cygwin configuration sections into one [PATCH 3/4] Makefile: keep MSVC and Cygwin configuration separate [PATCH 4/4] win32: Improve the conditional inclusion of WIN32 API code

I think they are all pretty safe (famous last words), but it would be a good idea for someone with an MSYS/MinGW installation to test them (particularly patch #4; it's really the only one I'm slightly worried about :D).

With these patches, the msvc build on cygwin seems to be working fine.

At first it looked bad; an ./git-status showed a shed-load of "Changed but not updated" files along with many "Untracked files" which should have been ignored (eg editor backup files).

In order to fix the ignored files problem, I had to make a change to ~/.gitconfig. The core.excludesfile was set to /home/ramsay/.gitignore, which (being a cygwin path) the msvc build could not read. However, setting this to C:/cygwin/home/ramsay/.gitignore fixed the problem since both the cygwin and msvc builds can read that path.

When ./git-diff showed that most of the "Changed" files differed only in the mode, in particular only the execute bit, it was easy to fix that also; set core.filemode to false.

This left only the symlink RelNotes, which was shown as deleted and an RelNotes.lnk file as untracked. This is to be expected on a cygwin git repo (and is an example of the "white-lies" that cygwin tells you when it iterates over the filesystem).

ATB, Ramsay Jones