Subject: Re: [PATCH 10/10] t7800: work around the MSYS path conversion on Windows

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2025 22:49:25 -0800

"Johannes Schindelin via GitGitGadget" <[email-masked]>
writes:

> From: Johannes Schindelin <[email-masked]>
>
> Git's test suite's relies on Unix shell scripting, which is
> understandable, of course, given Git's firm roots (and indeed, ongoing
> focus) on Linux.
>
> This fact, combined with Unix shell scripting's natural
> habitat -- which is, naturally... *drumroll*... Unix --
> often has unintended side effects, where developers expect the test
> suite to run in a Unix environment, which is an incorrect assumption.

Surely, those who are primarily on Linux, or those whose background
is from other kinds of UNIX, cannot be expected to be intimately
familiar with how the POSIX shell script environment ported to
Windows platform behaves, and it is understandable if they expect,
as a port, it would behave more or less the same way as they are
accustomed to on UNIX.  Even though POSIX shell script environment
used to run our end-to-end tests are ported to Windows, however, the
scripts still need to be aware of certain things that have to be
done differently in Windows environment from how they are done in
UNIX environment.  Here what you fixed, the absolute pathname may
begin with <drive> <colon> instead of <slash>, may be one of them.

And these differences are not necessarily well known and/or
advertised to many of the developers who have written our tests on
Linux or macOS over time.  I wonder if we can do something about
that, instead of reacting to breakage retroactively while
complaining with disgust about the platform differences, which is
what we often have to see on this list.

> Let's instead rely on the much more reliable fact that
> `ls` will output the path in a line that ends in a colon, and simply
> filter out those lines by matching said colon instead.

That is clever and clean, a very well crafted solution.

Will queue.  The entire series looked quite sensibly reasoned.

Thanks.