git-gui not working in a non-default Cygwin installation.

   Hi all.

   I am unsure whether this is the right group for asking this question 
and if it is not please excuse me and/or redirect me to a more suitable one.

   We are looking into using git for our source control needs but ran 
into some problems.

   One of these is that it seems that with the latest git release the 
git-gui script changed and started hardcoding some absolute paths in it 
during its build (git-gui/Makefile replaces @@GITGUI_SCRIPT@@ with a 
hardcoded path). However, this causes the prebuilt Cygwin package to not 
work in case Cygwin is not installed in its default location at 
C:\Cygwin (e.g. D:\Cygwin or C:\Program Files\Cygwin).

   Everything works fine if you manually edit the git-gui script and 
change the hard-coded path defined there.

   Is there something I'm missing here? E.g. is there any way for the 
Cygwin installation to set the correct path here? Or is the user 
supposed to modify this by hand on every installation? If this is so, 
then what other such files are expected to be modified?

   Many thanks.

   Best regards,
     Jurko Gospodnetić

Jurko Gospodneti <jurko.gospodnetic@docte.hr> wrote:

This is a pretty good place to start for all things Git related.  :)
 

Gaaaaah.

This is not what I had intended to have happen. Users should not need to edit binary package files post installation to make things work correctly.

There's a lot of people I could try to point fingers at for this, but I think its all mine. :-\

First, let me point out that Cygwin's Tcl/Tk is stuck on 8.4.1 and will probably never get updated again. I have had some bugs with git-gui on 8.4.1 on Windows where git-fetch/git-push processes get hung and don't function correctly. Upgrading Tcl/Tk to the native Windows binaries of version 8.4.15 resolves the problem, but that binary cannot handle Cygwin paths and Cygwin mount points.

Cygwin gets around needing to embed absolute paths into binary files at build time by using the mount point feature to relocate those paths onto the user's system. Thus '/' can be D:\Cygwin on your system and C:\Program Files\Cygwin on mine. Executables linked against the Cygwin library can still function just fine, but native Win32 programs (like Tcl/Tk 8.4.15) can't.

git-gui assumes its going to be running on a newer (and more stable) Tcl/Tk so its build process embeds the Windows path into the script. *sigh*

I'll have to figure out on Cygwin if the $TCL_PATH I'm using is able to resolve Cygwin absolute paths or not, and then build the script accordingly. Fun.

I'll try to work up a Makefile patch in the next few days and get it into a gitgui-0.9.3 maint release, which will probably roll up into git 1.5.4.3.

   Hi Shawn.

   Sorry, I seem to be a bit confused about this... Why does cygwin not 
support Tcl/Tk above version 8.4.1?

   What about the information found on 
http://opencircuitdesign.com/cygwin under 'Tcl-Cygwin binary 
distribution download and install:'? It lists some additional downloads 
that may be used to install the latest Tcl/Tk on cygwin... Why is this 
not included in the regular Cygwin distribution (setup.exe)?

   But new version of Tcl/Tk or not, this will not work unless you 
actually *build* git-gui on your final target system. Why does this 
information need to be hardcoded in the script at all? Can it not be 
detected at run-time?

   Thanks!

   Best regards,
     Jurko Gospodnetić

Jurko Gospodneti? wrote:

The Cygwin tcl/tk package exists primarily to support the Insight debugger which uses its own bundled in-tree copy of tcl + tk + itcl + itk. If someone were to hack on Insight to decouple it, then it might be possible to ship a different/newer version, but not until then.

Brian

"Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org> wrote:

...

So it took me longer than "next few days" but there is now a two patch series in my maint branch that resolves this issue. If git-gui is built with a Tcl/Tk that understands Cygwin path translations it keeps the library path in POSIX format, but if it builds with a Tcl/Tk that is a native Win32 binary then it uses cygpath to translate the path.

Although now that I think about it the relative path case should be able to be enabled again in the native Win32 codepath, as we only ran into problems with it on Cygwin.

Anyway, it will be in gitgui-0.9.3, which I expect will be bundled into git 1.5.4.3, which Junio has stated may be next week.

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