Re: Cygwin Git with Windows paths

[Adam Dinwoodie <adam at dinwoodie dot org>]

On Sun, 18 Nov 2018 at 06:07, Steven Penny wrote:
>
> Cygwin Git can clone with Unix form paths:
>
>     $ git clone git://github.com/benhoyt/goawk /tmp/goawk
>     Cloning into '/tmp/goawk'...
>     remote: Enumerating objects: 330, done.
>
> However it fails with Windows form:
>
>     $ git clone git://github.com/benhoyt/goawk 'C:\cygwin64\tmp\goawk'
>     Cloning into 'C:\cygwin64\tmp\goawk'...
>     fatal: Invalid path '/home/Steven/C:\cygwin64\tmp\goawk': No such file or
>     directory
>
> and mixed form:
>
>     $ git clone git://github.com/benhoyt/goawk C:/cygwin64/tmp/goawk
>     fatal: Invalid path '/home/Steven/C:/cygwin64': No such file or directory
>
> Note that other Cygwin programs work fine with these forms:
>
>     $ ls 'C:\cygwin64'
>     bin         Cygwin.ico           dev  home  sbin  usr
>     Cygwin.bat  Cygwin-Terminal.ico  etc  lib   tmp   var
>
> This causes problems for any non-Cygwin tools that might call Git:
>
> http://github.com/golang/go/issues/23155

Personally, I don't see this as a bug; AIUI using Windows style paths
isn't something that is supported in general in Cygwin, even if it's
something that works in some circumstances. I acknowledge that this
causes problems for non-Cygwin tools using Cygwin Git, but the
solution there is to either use Cygwin aware/native versions of those
tools, or to use non-Cygwin versions of Git.

In particular, I'm wary of fixing this set of interop problem
introducing some other problem; I'd prefer Cygwin tools to fail to
handle Windows paths entirely than the current situation where "c:"
refers to a file of that exact name in the current directory, and
"c:\" sometimes refers to a completely different directory, when on
*nix systems in general both would refer to files in the current
directory.

I see you've raised this on the Git mailing list as well, and if the
upstream Git package starts to handle such paths, I'll take the
relevant patches. However since I don't consider this a bug, I'm not
going to raise it myself.

Adam

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