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, 18:27 UTC
Message-ID: <7vwslethca.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <32541b130805281052o2a56f00m4b64299737d27091@mail.gmail.com>

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

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> On 5/28/08, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>>  Please learn to think before typing, let alone sending such a message to
>>  waste other people's time.
>
> Phew, just mentioning Windows on this list seems to get people flamed.

I did not flame Windows.

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> Reading over my message, I'm not sure what I would have written to
> have it interpreted as being negative....
> The part that's not surviving is git-bisect, which is a valid problem
> that resulted in someone asking to rewrite the history.  Clearly
> rewriting the history is not a good solution, thus no good solution
> has yet been proposed, which is why I wrote my message.

Here is what you wrote:

    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', which
    might be overkill.

"Survive failing to create files"? "Fatal error when trying to create 'nul', which might be overkill"?

If you cannot faithfully recreate the work tree state, you cannot test that revision. You cannot bisect and test that revision on that system. Too bad, but you still have "git reset --hard". You reset to some other revision that you _can_ checkout and do sensible tests and move on.

How would you know to reset to recover from your system's deficiency unless git gives "fatal error"?

That's why I asked you to think before type, which again you did not do, and that is what got you get "flamed", even though I do not think it was particularly harsh.