threads / discuss / 5506

Cygwin playbook?

Subject: Cygwin playbook?

## tl;dr

8 messages between Sep 7, 2006 and Sep 7, 2006.

replies: 7people: 4as markdown or json

Martin Langhoff· Sep 7, 2006, 04:59 UTC · lore

A colleage wants to work with us on a git project but is Trapped In Windows (TM). He does have a cywgin install, and I was hoping to find a cygwin install howto. Alas, I couldn't find any (is there one and Google doesn't know about it?).

Now, I am a bit at a loss, as I don't have access to windows. So for you cygwin knights in the woods, a few questions...

 - What cygwin packages are needed?
 - Need to fudge makefile?
 - How do I install for personal use?
 - How do I install in /usr/local?
 - Anything else I should know?

I'll be more than happy to shape the replies in a nice wiki page... (Mercurial has one already http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/WindowsInstall )

cheers,
martin
Junio C Hamano· Sep 7, 2006, 06:59 UTC · re: Martin Langhoff · lore

Re: Cygwin playbook?

"Martin Langhoff" <martin.langhoff@gmail.com> writes:
> - What cygwin packages are needed?

I am not in front of Windows machine so I need to check later if nobody beats me to this, but essentially it is the same as on sane Unix systems. Cygwin folks did a good job providing necessary libraries readily available from their Setup.exe.

> - Need to fudge makefile?

No; not even autoconf was needed and it installed out of the box for me (w2k).

> - How do I install for personal use?

make install would install under whereever you call ~/bin in Cygwin environment, and that is how I have mine.

> - How do I install in /usr/local?

I do not think of a reason why "make prefix=/usr/local" would not work but I haven't tried it myself so don't quote me on this.

> - Anything else I should know?

You would probably have great pain if on vfat. It appears to work Ok on NTFS. It appears to be quite slow, judging from the way it runs our standard test suite.

Martin Langhoff· Sep 7, 2006, 07:18 UTC · re: Junio C Hamano · lore

Re: Cygwin playbook?

On 9/7/06, Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> wrote:
Show 8 quoted lines
> "Martin Langhoff" <martin.langhoff@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > - What cygwin packages are needed?
>
> I am not in front of Windows machine so I need to check later if
> nobody beats me to this, but essentially it is the same as on
> sane Unix systems.  Cygwin folks did a good job providing
> necessary libraries readily available from their Setup.exe.

Sorry to ask this... Are you sure? Vanilla base setup with no extra packages getting gcc and various -dev packages? Perhaps there is a 'developer' profile during install that gets you a reasonable kit?

About 5 minutes ago I managed to get limited access (non-root, cannot install packages) to a cygwin env using rdesktop. It did have gcc and make, but make bombed out with a missing libcurl and openssl header files. IIRC, diff3/merge isn't in the base install either.

In debian I can look at apt-cache show git-core to get a quick overview of dependencies but here I'm lost :(

> > - Need to fudge makefile?
>
> No; not even autoconf was needed and it installed out of the box
> for me (w2k).
That's great to know.
> > - How do I install for personal use?
>
> make install would install under whereever you call ~/bin in
> Cygwin environment, and that is how I have mine.
Kewl.
Show 5 quoted lines
> > - How do I install in /usr/local?
>
> I do not think of a reason why "make prefix=/usr/local" would
> not work but I haven't tried it myself so don't quote me on
> this.

Is cygwin still installable in 2 modes? (Used to be personal and system-wide or something like that.)

If that's the case, then in a system-wide install you must be root to write to /usr/local (I'm guessing here) and there's no sudo or su -c 'make prefix=/usr/local install' so you'd have to open an admin session. Can cygwin shell be invoked under RunAs?

Show 5 quoted lines
> > - Anything else I should know?
>
> You would probably have great pain if on vfat.  It appears to
> work Ok on NTFS.  It appears to be quite slow, judging from
> the way it runs our standard test suite.

Thanks! So no vfat. In terms of speed, this should be for a small/medium project. No linux kernel development on Windows just yet ;-)

Thanks! that's a starting point, though I'm intrigued about the packages required. Are there ways to query what packages you have installed (a la dpkg -l) and to install a list of packages from commandline?

Oh, what an ignorant fop I am.
cheers,
martin
Junio C Hamano· Sep 7, 2006, 08:07 UTC · re: Martin Langhoff · lore

Re: Cygwin playbook?

"Martin Langhoff" <martin.langhoff@gmail.com> writes:
> Sorry to ask this... Are you sure? Vanilla base setup with no extra
> packages getting gcc and various -dev packages? Perhaps there is a
> 'developer' profile during install that gets you a reasonable kit?
What I meant was "readily available", not "installed by default". 
> About 5 minutes ago I managed to get limited access (non-root, cannot
> install packages) to a cygwin env using rdesktop. It did have gcc and
> make, but make bombed out with a missing libcurl and openssl header
> files. IIRC, diff3/merge isn't in the base install either.
It is in rcs as usual ;-).
> In debian I can look at apt-cache show git-core to get a quick
> overview of dependencies but here I'm lost :(

The packaging was pretty much similar and I could guess from apt-cache show git-core output indeed ;-).

Martin Langhoff· Sep 7, 2006, 10:37 UTC · re: Junio C Hamano · lore

Re: Cygwin playbook?

On 9/7/06, Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> wrote:
> What I meant was "readily available", not "installed by default".

I imagined. Thanks to all though! What do you think of http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/WindowsInstall as a starting point? I've tried to summarize this thread a bit, and added some of my own notes.

Will update further with learned lessons from helping Kris out with his Cygwin environment.

BTW, sorry about the double post -- I initially sent the 'Cygwin playbook' email, bogofilter bounced it, and I tried again changing the words I thought would be trigger words. Didnt work -- complained to postmaster@ and they thawed... both of them...

cheers,
martin
Christopher Faylor· Sep 7, 2006, 14:22 UTC · re: Martin Langhoff · lore

Re: Cygwin playbook?

On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 07:18:10PM +1200, Martin Langhoff wrote:
Show 6 quoted lines
>Thanks! that's a starting point, though I'm intrigued about the
>packages required.  Are there ways to query what packages you have
>installed (a la dpkg -l) and to install a list of packages from
>commandline?
>
>Oh, what an ignorant fop I am.

The program which shows what packages are installed is "cygcheck" (i.e., "man cygcheck").

The mailing list for Cygwin is mentioned at the Cygwin web site. You might have more luck with questions like this on the Cygwin mailing list.

cgf
Shawn Pearce· Sep 7, 2006, 07:27 UTC · re: Junio C Hamano · lore

Re: Cygwin playbook?

Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> wrote:
> "Martin Langhoff" <martin.langhoff@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > - What cygwin packages are needed?

I'd have to check tomorrow but I run a pretty reduced set of Cygwin packages with Git. I'm using something around:

	rcs (for merge)
	python (for merge-recursive, though merge-recur is a *huge* win)
	wish (for gitk)
	perl
	ssh
	openssl
	curl
	expat
	... maybe i missed something but probably not...
	make
	gcc
	binutils (sorta necessary to compile!)
iirc I build git on Windows with a command as simple as:
	make prefix=/usr/local/git NO_MMAP=1 install

I actually have it in a small shell script as I then turn around and tar/bz2 that directory and make a Cygwin package out of it for other folks at my site.

> > - How do I install for personal use?
> 
> make install would install under whereever you call ~/bin in
> Cygwin environment, and that is how I have mine.
I personally don't like the default prefix so I always retarget Git
to another directory.  This works just fine on Cygwin just like on
any UNIX system.
Show 5 quoted lines
> > - Anything else I should know?
> 
> You would probably have great pain if on vfat.  It appears to
> work Ok on NTFS.  It appears to be quite slow, judging from
> the way it runs our standard test suite.

I see odd behavior when its not a locally mounted NTFS filesystem. For example sometimes our SAMBA server (a Solaris system) doesn't play nicely with our XP systems and we get bad error codes back (still haven't figured that one out). We also have what I believe is a Windows 2003 server whose drive is mapped onto many 2000/XP desktops; that drive can't properly rename the index file so we can't use it for working directory storage. Works fine though for bare repositories. Local NTFS has never been an issue.

I see large slowdowns when the number of loose objects >~100. So I repack frequently. No, defragging hasn't helped. Only repacking has.

I just started using merge-recur (export GIT_USE_RECUR_FOR_RECURSIVE=1 to enable) over git-merge-recursive. Its a huge performance gain. I'm glad Alex Riesen and Johannes Schindelin have put so much effort into it.

gitk has layout issues on Cygwin. I always whack my ~/.gitk file and then have to resize the window every time it launches. People have reported this bug in the past but I don't think anyone has taken the time to work it out. It hasn't annoyed me enough (yet) to justify me spending time on it.

Git pretty much works as you would expect; its just somewhat slower than on a good UNIX system. Maybe its Cygwin, maybe its Windows, maybe its the 4+ year old system its running on. :-)

-- 
Shawn.
Christopher Faylor· Sep 7, 2006, 14:23 UTC · re: Shawn Pearce · lore

Re: Cygwin playbook?

On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 03:27:41AM -0400, Shawn Pearce wrote:
>Git pretty much works as you would expect; its just somewhat slower
>than on a good UNIX system.  Maybe its Cygwin, maybe its Windows,
>maybe its the 4+ year old system its running on.  :-)

It's likely to be the fact that Windows doesn't support fork or exec so Cygwin has to emulate both - slowly.

cgf

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