Re: [PATCH v2 4/4] upload-archive: use start_command instead of fork

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Aug 01, 2011 at 11:52:43PM +0200, René Scharfe wrote:

> Am 01.08.2011 23:20, schrieb Johannes Sixt:
> > Am 01.08.2011 22:48, schrieb René Scharfe:
> >> So git archive gives the right results when writing to a pipe, but
> >> always the same wrong result when writing directly to a file.
> > 
> > This could indeed be a CRLF issue. archive-tar.c runs gzip to let it
> > write to the original fd 1 (stdout). gzip is an MSYS program, and MSYS
> > is "clever" and sets up the channel in text mode (CRLF conversion) if it
> > is a regular file, but in binary mode if it is a pipe.
> > 
> > Without the gzip filter, git-archive writes to stdout itself. Since we
> > have set up all our channels in binary mode, we do not suffer from the
> > same problem for plain tar format.
> > 
> > So, I don't think we can do a lot about it, short of patching MSYS again...
> 
> Or we could pipe the output through us, i.e. attach a builtin version of
> cat at the output end of the called command.  Only on Windows, of
> course.  Better ugly and limping then wrong, right?

Yeah, that would work. But I am confused. If what Johannes says is true,
isn't MSYS gzip totally broken for:

  # works
  echo foo | gzip -c | cat >foo.gz

  # broken; introduces CR
  echo foo | gzip -c >foo.gz

? (The "works" and "broken" there are my guesses; I don't have a Windows
box to test on). IOW, is it simply gzip that is broken, and any fix we
do is simply working around a bug in gzip? And therefore the right
solution is for MSYS people to fix gzip?

-Peff