Re: [PATCH v1] handle lower case drive letters on Windows

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 11, 2018, 20:11 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqq36wp3549.fsf@gitster-ct.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <BL0PR2101MB1012D2CC0BEA20AB35CBE967F45A0@BL0PR2101MB1012.namprd21.prod.outlook.com>

Ben Peart <Ben.Peart@microsoft.com> writes:

Show 23 quoted lines

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
>> Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2018 1:59 PM
>> To: Ben Peart <Ben.Peart@microsoft.com>
>> Cc: git <git@vger.kernel.org>; Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
>> Subject: Re: [PATCH v1] handle lower case drive letters on Windows
>> 
>> On Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 10:54 AM Ben Peart <Ben.Peart@microsoft.com>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > Teach test-drop-caches to handle lower case drive letters on Windows.
>> 
>> As someone not quite familiar with Windows (and using Git there),
>> is this addressing a user visible issue, or a developer visible issue?
>> (It looks to me as the latter as it touches test code). In which way
>> does it improve the life of a developer?
>> 
>
> It is a developer visible issue.  On Windows, file names (including drive
> letters) are case insensitive.  This patch improves the life of a Windows
> developer by making drive letters case insensitive for the test-drop-caches
> test application as well.  Without this patch "test-drop-caches e" will fail
> with an error "Invalid drive letter 'e'" instead of succeeding as expected.

I think one point of the original question was if it is common for a developer to say "test-drop-caches e" from the command line, or the helper is run solely by being written in some numbered test script directly under t/. In the latter case, it would be reasonable to expect and insist the scripts to use the more canonical form, even if the platform is case insensitive (assuming E: is more canonical than e:, that is) no?

In any case, a larger point is that it would help other people who read the patch and "git log" output, if the answer you gave Stefan in the message I am responding to, and another one that you may give me in a response to this message, were in the proposed log message in the patch.

Thanks.