Re: introduction, fix for npm w.r.t. git, and questions

[Adam Dinwoodie <adam@dinwoodie.org>]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 03:21:27PM +0000, Brian Clifton wrote:
> (I've never joined a mailing list so please bear with me as I learn how this works)

Hi Brian, welcome!

> I saw the email chain regarding Git using Windows paths; I wanted to
> share that I've been fighting that too. Specifically, npm will fail
> npm installs because it will try to use the Windows path. I submitted
> the following PR to fix that:
>
> https://github.com/npm/npm/pull/12366

My JavaScript is somewhat rusty, and I've never used npm, but it looks
to me that the problem here is that npm's `process.platform` in `git.js`
is set to 'win32'.  Cygwin isn't 'win32' -- it's a fundamentally
different beast that just happens to sit on top of Windows -- so
attempting to treat Cygwin as Windows is going to cause all sorts of
pain.

I think the "correct" fix would be to get npm (or possibly the
JavaScript engine itself?) to stop acting as if it's in a Windows
environment when it's running under Cygwin; the Cygwin environment is
much more like a *nix environment than anything else.  I've no idea what
that change would involve, though.

> With how many folks experience issues w/ git on Cygwin,
> I'd like to help popularize *some* kind of fix, whatever it might be,
> since NPM and likely other projects are not willing to support Cygwin.

This sort of experience is, as best I can tell, pretty rare actually.
Generally if you have a user (or a process) running within Cygwin, it's
expecting to use POSIX-style paths exclusively -- the whole point of
Cygwin being to provide a POSIX-like environment on Windows -- and the
only time you need to think about Windows-style paths is if you're
calling a native Windows application from within Cygwin (at which point
you normally know that's what you're doing and can use cygpath).

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple