[darcs-devel] [darcs #497] w32: use cygwin ssh?

[David Roundy]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 08:27:30PM -0400, Zooko via RT wrote:
> My co-worker here is trying darcs for the first time, and he is
> frustrated that it won't use his cygwin ssh, which he has already
> configured to use the right port numbers, private keys, etc., so instead
> he has to learn to configure putty for the same things.
> 
> It seems to me that darcs.exe (being, as we all know, a pure Windows
> application) could execute "c:\cygwin\usr\bin\scp.exe" just as well as it
> can execute "c:\Program Files\putty\scp.exe".
> 
> Oh, we tried setting DARCS_SSH to point to the cygwin scp, but it didn't

I assume this was a typo, but you should be setting DARCS_SCP, not
DARCS_SSH to point to cygwin scp.

> work.  I suspect that darcs uses putty-style cmdline options if it is
> built for win32.

No, darcs always uses the standard scp command-line interface.  I'm not
really the one to ask, but I seem to recall being told that the problem has
to do with cygwin apps (e.g. cygwin scp) not accepting windows paths, which
darcs passes to scp.

You could also try setting DARCS_SCP to be a shell script that dumps its
command-line arguments to a file to see just what darcs is doing.  I
couldn't say for certain whether darcs passes absolute paths or relative
paths to scp.  cygwin ssh would choke on absolute paths, but might work
with relative paths, so I speculate that we may be able to fix the problem
by restricting ourselves to passing relative paths to scp/sftp.  (This will
probably only get resolved if a windows darcs developer steps up to work on
this, I'm just suggesting directions one might approach.)
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net