Re: [BUG] Clones from local repositories do not work correctly under Windows

From: Johannes Sixt <j6t@kdbg.org>
Date: Apr 12, 2024, 21:53 UTC
Message-ID: <ee644475-8387-4dbf-a4b9-0d301bd7cf5b@kdbg.org>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqil0mmqpx.fsf@gitster.g>

Am 12.04.24 um 19:32 schrieb Junio C Hamano:

Show 23 quoted lines

> Johannes Sixt <j6t@kdbg.org> writes:
> 
>> alternate: C:/Temp/repoorig/.git/objects
>> alternate: /c/Temp/repoorig/.git/objects
>>
>> This is the MSYS2/Cygwin absolute path with a "drive letter".
>> Unfortunately, this kind of path is unintelligible for Git for Windows.
>> It expects absolute paths to begin with drive letter-colon or a
>> double-slash or double-backslash. For this reason, it reports "unable to
>> normalize alternate object path".
>>
>> The conclusion is: Do not use two different flavors of Git on a
>> repository that is set up with a link to an alternate repository.
> 
> I do not complain to the conclusion, and I do not use Windows, but
> it makes me wonder if there is a way to spell that full path that
> can be understood by both implementations.  The two implementations
> are not incompatible in the actual object contents and refnames and
> other things in .git/ directory, are they?
> 
> In short, does MSYS2/Cygwin understand paths in "C:/Temp/..." style,
> and if so, writing that out, even though it may not what it
> considers the native format, would make the world a happier place.

Yes, MSYS2 should understand C:/Temp. This can be achieved easily by doing the clone with Git for Windows. A small complication is, though, that the actual contents of the .git/objects/info/alternates is constructed from the literal command line arguments. In my test I used

   git clone -s C:\Temp\repoorig repoclone

which writes

   C:\Temp\repoorig/.git/objects

to the file. The path we see in the output of count-objects -v is obviously a normalized version. Users will have to say

   git clone -s C:/Temp/repoorig repoclone

to get the more widely understood version into the file.

-- Hannes