Re: Commit cce8d6fdb introduces file t/t5100/nul, git tree is now incompatible with Cygwin (and probably Windows)

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 28, 2008, 17:24 UTC
Message-ID: <7vfxs2uytm.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <32541b130805280933r573d59d0mf9cdc09f5e5a6a17@mail.gmail.com>

"Avery Pennarun" <apenwarr@gmail.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> As an unhappy Windows user myself (sometimes), I think it might be
> better to simply fix git to *survive* failing to create files like
> 'nul' on Win32, rather than trying to *fix* such files in the repo.
> It sounds (from the original post) like git has a *fatal* error
> ("cannot be checked out on cygwin") when trying to create 'nul'.

Please learn to think before typing, let alone sending such a message to waste other people's time.

We give the user an error message, and signal error by exiting with non-zero. You cannot have that path on the system, and we are being honest about it. It is not like we are suddenly painting the screen in blue and refusing to get any more user input when you try to check out such a tree. Which part of that is _not_ surviving?

The system with a *fatal* error is not git but the one that does not want an not-so-unreasonable name "NUL" on it. Git survives on such a system and tells you what happened --- you cannot do certain things, such as checking out such a tree. You live with it, or get a better system ;-)

What alternatives do you want to implement? Certainly not silently creating "nul-garbage" file instead and pretend that nothing bad happened, as that would lead to madness.