Re: [PATCH 1/2] subtree: fix the GIT_EXEC_PATH sanity check to work on Windows

Hi Luke,

On Fri, 11 Jun 2021, Luke Shumaker wrote:

On Fri, 11 Jun 2021 04:19:17 -0600,
Johannes Schindelin wrote:

quoted

On Thu, 10 Jun 2021, Luke Shumaker wrote:

quoted

On Thu, 10 Jun 2021 03:13:30 -0600,
Johannes Schindelin via GitGitGadget wrote:

quoted

-if test -z "$GIT_EXEC_PATH" || test "${PATH#"${GIT_EXEC_PATH}:"}" = "$PATH" || ! test -f "$GIT_EXEC_PATH/git-sh-setup"
+if test -z "$GIT_EXEC_PATH" || {
+	test "${PATH#"${GIT_EXEC_PATH}:"}" = "$PATH" && {
+		# On Windows, PATH might be Unix-style, GIT_EXEC_PATH not
+		! type -p cygpath >/dev/null 2>&1 ||
+		test "${PATH#$(cygpath -au "$GIT_EXEC_PATH"):}" = "$PATH"

Nit: That should have a couple more `"` in it:

    test "${PATH#"$(cygpath -au "$GIT_EXEC_PATH"):"}" = "$PATH"

Are you sure about that?

	$ P='*:hello'; echo "${P#$(echo '*'):}"
	hello

As you can see, there is no problem with that `echo '*'` producing a
wildcard character.

In any case, neither '*' nor '?' are valid filename characters on Windows,
therefore there is little danger here.

In the other email (the reply to Junio), I specified that it's only a
problem if the glob isn't self-matching.  So * and ? are fine, but
[charset] probably isn't.

    $ P='f[o]o:bar'; echo "${P#$(echo 'f[o]o'):}"
    f[o]o:bar

    $ P='f[o]o:bar'; echo "${P#"$(echo 'f[o]o'):"}"
    bar

Thank you for clarifying.

This is actually a valid concern also on Windows because according to
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/naming-a-file the
brackets _are_ valid file name characters.

quoted

To be honest, I was looking more for reviews focusing on
potentially-better solutions, such as looking at the inodes, or even
comparing the contents of `$GIT_EXEC_PATH/git-subtree` and
`${PATH%%:*}/git-subtree`, and complaining if they're not identical.

So the check right now is gross, but I don't know what would be
better.  The point of the check is more to check "is the environment
set up the way that `git` sets it up for us", not so much to actually
check the filesystem.

Plus, it shouldn't actually care if it's installed in `$GIT_EXEC_PATH`
or not, it should be totally happy for $GIT_EXEC_PATH/git-subtree to
not exist and for git-subtree to be elsewhere in the PATH.  So an
inode or content check would be wrong.  Perhaps checking git-sh-setup
instead of git-subtree though...

quoted

Those two ideas look a bit ham-handed to me, though, the latter because it
reads the file twice, for _every_ `git subtree` invocation, and the fomer
because there simply is no easy portable way to look at the inode of a
file (stat(1) has different semantics depending whether it is the GNU or
the BSD flavor, and it might not even be present to begin with).

`test FILE1 -ef FILE2` checks wether the inode is the same.  And it's
POSIX, so I'm assuming that it's sufficiently portable, though I
haven't actually tested whether things other than Bash implement it.

It's not POSIX. From
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/test.html:

	Some additional primaries newly invented or from the KornShell
	appeared in an early proposal as part of the conditional command
	([[]]): s1 > s2, s1 < s2, str = pattern, str != pattern,
	f1 -nt f2, f1 -ot f2, and f1 -ef f2.

Having said that, it appears that Bash implements it (what non-standard
behavior _doesn't_ it implement ;-))

And since Git for Windows ships with Bash, we can actually use it!

quoted

I was also looking forward to hear whether there are opinions about maybe
dropping this check altogether because there were indications that this
condition is not even common anymore.

I think it would be good for it to eventually go away.  But having
removed the hacks that allowed it to work in broken setups, I have no
way of knowing how many people had setups like that unless they tell
me now that it's telling them, and if those users are now broken, I
don't want them to be *silently* broken.  So I think we do need to
have the check for a longish period of time.

quoted

quoted

But no need to re-roll for just that.

Do we also need to handle the reverse case, where PATH uses
backslashes but GIT_EXEC_PATH uses forward slashes?

In Git for Windows, we ensure to use forward slashes in `GIT_EXEC_PATH`.

Did you mean to write `PATH` here instead of `GIT_EXEC_PATH`?  Because
if not, then I'm confused.

Ah, I thought it was clear that the `PATH` variable is already _not_ the
standard Windows version (which contains backslashes and _semicolons_),
but it is adjusted automatically by the MSYS2 runtime to look more
Unix-like (with forward slashes and _colons_).

Ciao,
Dscho