[OpenAFS-devel] Git/gerrit basics (Windows)

Felix Frank Felix.Frank@Desy.de
Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:35:28 +0200


> For Windows-only people, using vi (or whatever) is pretty painful.

I heartily recommend to all Windows only users to install and learn the 
ways of the excellent gvim port - really it's awesome!

Failing that (I am also not going to engage in flamewar about editors, 
in case anyone wonders), I presume that the "git bash" should be able to 
be configured to use whatever pleases you. I will verify this later, but 
you may want to try to
$ export EDITOR=/path/to/notepad.exe

> If I make the file using Notepad and the commit becomes corrupted
> as a result of the <carriage return><line feed> situation, is there a
> clean way to fix the mess?

What exactly is that situation? What are the exact problems?

Take not of the core.autocrlf option, please, although I don't think 
that it affects commit messages from what 
http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-config.html has to 
say about it. I would be greatly interested in any findings you make!

> I haven't tried any of this yet. Anyone know what msysGit thinks
> should be the editor? Is there a way to change it to something simple?

See above.

> A footnote or maybe a separate page for Windows users would be a big
> help here. The "~/.." notation is foreign to Windows and there is no
> ~/.ssh directory after a msysGit install & build.

I'll take your word on this. Notice, however, that from my experience, 
the git bash does a rather decent job at faking a *nix-like environment 
to you (without going all the cygwin way). So any Linux- or whatever 
guide on configuring OpenSSH should apply rather well. Specifically, 
doing something along the lines of
$ test -f ~/.ssh || mkdir ~/.ssh ; notepad.exe ~/.ssh/config
should Just Work. But you're probably well beyond that point by now...

> If, like me, you already have SSH keys, it's not at all clear what
> you're supposed to do with them. Using msysGen, I generated another set
> and discovered where msysGen wants them (it's C:\Documents and
> Settings\<username>\.ssh). It would also be useful to note the use of
> the -C switch to set the user name in the keys since the default
> is login-name@machine-name on a Windows box which almost never equates
> to anything useful.

So it is on Linux. I fail to see the problem - I use that exact user 
name for my gerrit interaction. I could add additional keys if I needed 
additional machines.

Cheers
  - Felix