[darcs-users] There is a specific, limited, set of ways in which the presence of cygwin on the operating system can have any effect on darcs's functionality.

[Eric Kow]

Hurrah!
The WinXP slave is now merely failing tests and not hanging on them.

> Being "under Cygwin" as such has relatively little meaning for this  
> test -- I think it means that the Perl interpreter is a cygwin- 
> compile of perl and that when perl invokes a system process it goes  
> through the cygwin bash shell.  But when darcs invokes a system  
> process it does not, so the fact that the perl interpreter is "under  
> Cygwin" shouldn't be construed as meaning that darcs itself is  
> operating in some foreign, non-Windows environment if you see what I  
> mean.

I am well aware that the darcs binary being built is a native Windows
program.  The issue here is not darcs's functionality but that of the
test suite, which is is dependent on your shell and Perl implementation.

The mystery is that darcs appears to ignoring the DARCS_EDITOR
environment variable which is set in the record_editor.pl. It appears
to do so only under Cygwin, or at least under the build slave

> I don't think that this currently happens, although this issue with  
> the "editor" might be a case of it, if darcs is executing a  
> subprocess named "edit" or something.

Darcs is expected to fall back to "edit" if it does not find emacs
and the like

> 2.  If there are some funny environment variables set in the  
> environment by tools that changed the user's environment when the  
> tool was installed, or set in the environment by the process which  
> invoked darcs (which in this case is perl).

This appears to be the case.  The tools set DARCS_EDITOR

> Running darcs "under cygwin" is exactly like running darcs "under  
> Windows" in the following ways:

Understood.

> I hope I've made the point clear.

All I know is that I cannot make test under the Cygwin shell, or rather,
if I do so, all the tests fail.  I'll have to look into it some day...
maybe...

Zooko, I appreciate your help taking care of the slave and your patience
in trying to educate us.  Right now, my priority is to get that 2.0.3
pre-release out the door.  Since the darcs test suite passes on my
MSYS-based setup, I think I shall disregard the buildslave failures for
purposes of this pre-release.

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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