Re: Case sensitivity on Windows for absolute paths.

From: Ricky Clarkson <ricky.clarkson@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 25, 2010, 07:33 UTC
Message-ID: <j2y7eeb06461004250033ue4434a41j7b9a752dea1f5fe1@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <201004232146.56424.j6t@kdbg.org>

Hi again,

It would be good if git automatically uppercased the drive letter, yes. However, I found the real root of my problem. Git Bash (msysgit) sets the working directory to c:\foo for programs launched if the working directory within it is /c/foo. Like having spaces in filenames, that just uncovers a whole myriad of small bugs and oddities in other programs.

For reference, Cygwin doesn't have that problem; cd /cygdrive/c/foo && cmd, cmd gets C:\foo as its working directory.

So to make what I wanted work, I just made sure everything msysgit installed be on the PATH, then ran everything from cmd.

I hope that this helps the next person who experiences this problem.

Thanks, Ricky.

--
Ricky Clarkson
Java and Scala Programmer, AD Holdings
+44 1928 706373
Skype: ricky_clarkson
Google Talk: ricky.clarkson@gmail.com
Google Wave: ricky.clarkson@googlewave.com

On 23 April 2010 20:46, Johannes Sixt <j6t@kdbg.org> wrote:

Show 25 quoted lines

> On Freitag, 23. April 2010, Ricky Clarkson wrote:
>> I noticed that if I have a git repository at C:\foo, and there is a
>> file in there named bar, git add bar works fine, git add C:\foo/bar
>> works fine but git add c:\foo/bar does not.  git reports that the file
>> 'is outside repository'.  Looking at setup.c it seems that string
>> comparisons are being used to determine whether a file is within the
>> repository.
>
> Yes, we should be a bit more liberal when drive letters are compared; they
> should be treated in a case-insensitive manner, but currently we are strict.
>
>> For my purposes I can probably make a Windows build that does it while
>> ignoring the case, but is there a more proper way that git should do
>> it?  I'm not familiar enough with the POSIX file routines to know.
>
> My guess is that it is sufficient that
>
> 1. the internal version of GIT_DIR is recorded with an uppercase drive letter;
>
> 2. normalize_path_copy() upper-cases the drive letter.
>
> Then the comparison in prefix_path() should do the right thing.
>
> -- Hannes
>