RE: CygWin SVN should identify as CygWin

[Adam Dinwoodie <Adam dot Dinwoodie at metaswitch dot com>]

Jochen Wiedmann wrote:
>On 07.08.2012 13:15, Adam Dinwoodie wrote:
>> This isn't Subversion's responsibility; the problem is more general: how do you
>> tell if the version of awk, sed or vim are Cygwin ones or not (or ones compiled
>> containing a specific patch, or built on a particular day, or any other of a
>> myriad of different things that could make a difference to an executable's
>> behaviour)?
>
>I don't know about "more general". However, I know very well that-
>there's a particular project (Maven Release Plugin), which has this very-
>problem with svn, not with awk, sed, or whatever. And I'd like to
>fix that specific problem, not eliminate hunger in the world, or do-
>whatever more general. To achieve that, I've pointed out a non-intrusive-
>and harmless change in CygWin SVN, which might help to resolve that problem.

Your definition of "harmless" does not necessarily match that of the package
maintainer's. You're proposing a Cygwin-specific change from the original
source code. Every such change means extra work for package maintainers, both
to make the change in the first place, then to keep making the change every
time the source code is updated.

>And, besides, your proposed solution won't work: I could, of course,
>use "which", or "where" to deduce the location of "svn", but what would
>that tell me. Assuming, I get "/usr/bin/svn", then I'd know that "which"
>is a CygWin binary (because it emits a CygWin path), but what's got that
>to do with svn? The fact that it resides in the CygWin bin directory
>doesn't mean it is also a CygWin binary.

So you want a solution that will allow you to tell when someone's been hacking
around in Cygwin's bin directory? If you're going to overwrite things in the
bin directory, I think that's something you have to do at your own risk and
knowing what you're doing. Putting executables that don't play nicely with
Cygwin in Cygwin's bin directory seems like an exceptionally bad idea however
you count it.

I think you're looking for the wrong solution. If someone is having trouble
with Maven because they've put Cygwin's bin directory in their path, then they
should clean up their path: Cygwin doesn't put itself in the path exactly
because it can cause problems like this.

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