Zooko intends to try this at some point and report back.  It is vaguely related
to issue28.

For what it's worth, I speculate that passing relative rather than absolute
paths might help.

David

This issue is more important now because putty doesn't do ControlMaster so it
can't take advantage of the cool new "one connection" feature of darcs 1.0.7.

Here's a proposed plan of action.  Any Windows developers volunteer to do this?

1. Look at the Cygpath C++ source: http://tinyurl.com/famkm
   (note: you might have to unroll the ball of yarn all the up to some
    helper library)

2. Reimplement in 3 lines of Haskell or less [;-)], thus providing a
   function
      windowsToUnixPath :: FilePath -> FilePath
   which translates a path like
      z:\Program Files\foo\bar
   into
      /cygpath/z/Program\ Files/foo/bar

3. Generalise the function hasSSHControlMasterIO (and its unsafe  wrapper)
       type SSHInfo = { isCygwinOpenSSH  :: Bool
                      , hasControlMaster :: Bool
                      }
       getSSHInfo :: SSHInfo 

   Notes: a combination of uname and ssh -v would probably do
   the job

4. All functions that invoke SSH : do path translation on all arguments that
   are paths if we are using the Cygwin OpenSSH

5. Write test cases

See this file by Simon Marlow

Attachments

• scpwrap.hs

Taking the risk of reopening a long-dormant flamewar, I'm marking this bug as
wont-fix.

Writing software for Unix is difficult.  Writing software for Windows is
difficult.  Writing software that's portable between Windows and Unix even more
so.

Writing software that works on a nondeterministic Windows/Unix hybrid such
as Cygwin is beyond what we can afford.  Thus, I would argue that unless
somebody volunteers for maintaining Darcs on Cygwin, we should make no
concessions for Cygwin users.

Please reopen this bug if you disagree and are willing to do the work and
willing to make sure it doesn't break in the foreseeable future.

I'm willing to (continue) to do work to support Cygwin users.

See also RT#496

Hi Zooko: I'm re-marking this as wont-fix due to lack of manpower.  In general,
I think the Darcs project should focus its Windows efforts on making a pure
Windows darcs, without worrying about Cygwin.  Perhaps a separate Cygwin-Darcs
effort outside the project would be a good idea.