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

From: Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de>
Date: Aug 11, 2007, 00:43 UTC
Message-ID: <EF7DFA5A-9C3A-4D0B-9533-D1D60AE4A44C@zib.de>
In-Reply-To: <e7bda7770708101531n782118e9qb9c6de4e934940ea@mail.gmail.com>

On Aug 11, 2007, at 12:31 AM, Torgil Svensson wrote:

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> On 8/10/07, Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de> wrote:
>
>>  [..list of tools and links]
>
> Thank you for the information!  i'll check those up.

I hope to have an improved list on monday, sorted by priority of the developers I'm working with.

I thought I do some coding, to find out a bit more about the stability of msysgit. So I started and added support for kdiff3 on Windows (see patches in separate mail).

I'm impressed. Pretty much everything I tried today worked for me. After I got git gui running, and learned how to avoid pitfalls of git submodule, development went smoothly. I pushed and pulled a bit from linux and mac and did some coding. Thanks for the vim setup!

I think you (and more people I don't yet know) did a great job with msysgit. I'd recommend it over cygwin's git, which caused some trouble for me.

Thanks!

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>>>> My goal would be to type 'make windist' in the official repo and
>>>> get a very basic installer (maybe just a zip archive) that contains
>>>> everything needed to run git on Windows. Unpacking this self-
>>>> contained
>>>> installer on a freshly installed Windows should get you going.  
>>>> There
>>>> should be no need to install Cygwin or something else.
>>>>
>>>> Is this realistic?
>>>> What is needed to get there?
>>>> What would be an estimated timeframe to achieve this goal?
>>>>
>>>> Will all this run on Windows XP 64 bit and Windows Vista 64 bit?
>>>
>>> How fast can you type?
>>
>> I don't see your point. The question is if git runs flawlessly
>> on 64 bit systems, which we use for development. I have no experience
>> with mingw. Maybe there are some issues with 64 bit Windows, maybe
>> not. But its a reasonable question?
>>
>>> Why does it have to be the _official_ repo? Git have submodule
>>> support, so you could do a repo called
>>> "my_excellent_git_environment_for_windows.git" and have the official
>>> repo as submodule (msysgit is done this way).
>>
>> The official repo would indicate a real commitment to me that
>> Windows support if officially maintained.
>
> I agree it's reasonable questions. My point is that to get something,
> you have to be active (and you're a prime example of that I think).
>
> Quoted from http://git.or.cz/ : "Traditionally, the low-level part of
> Git is called plumbing and the interfaces and frontends are called
> porcelains. Git itself comes with a default porcelain bundled and that
> is actually what you will normally mean when you say you use Git."
>
>
> What do you include in the "make windist" installer and the "Windows
> support" ?  Are you talking porcelain or plumbing?

Hard to say. I believe now, from what I learned today, that the msysgit approach is quite reasonable: Grouping all needed unix tools around a submodule containing git. But the submodule should be git.git. I think this is what I'd expect. I like the idea of bringing everything needed along, and keeping it separate from the rest of the system. This avoids conflicts with, for example, cygwin.

I don't think I would expect much more for a basic setup. All tests should run, maybe some msysgit tests would be needed to test the pitfalls we'll discover; maybe not. I'll test XP 64 bit and Vista 64 bit beginning of next week. Getting started hacking msysgit could be a bit easier. I didn't like the submodule problems I ran into and I still didn't find out how to push to the git mob branch.

For me a next step would be do some polishing. For example tune git to integrate with other Windows tools, like what I proposed for git-mergetool. I really started to love git when it launched a graphical mergetool automatically for me. After that point I never edited merge markers again. Things I needed too much time before are now running so smoothly. I think such a tight integration is really useful to convince people. I'd also expect default choices to be reasonable. I'm not yet 100% sure, but my feeling it that core.autocrlf should be set to true by default on Windows, globally. A bit more of msysgit specific documentation would also be good. Maybe we should add a platform specific section to the user-manual. How could help in msysgit be handled? By a Windows help document?

I could also think of a fail safe update, that allows to upgrade an existing msysgit to a specific tag (maybe after stashing the current installation and reverting in case of problems).

Maybe git gui could be integrated with the Windows Explorer and be launched on a directory. Maybe this is one of your evil plans. But this is already more than I need.

Back to the basic stuff. What do you think is needed to merge changes back to git.git? I counted approximately 20k diff lines (incl. context) between msysgit's git master and git.git's master. At a first glance much of them seem to be compatibility stuff.

	Steffen