Re: [PATCH v2 1/3] git clone <url> C:\cygwin\home\USER\repo' is working (again)

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi Elijah,

On Tue, 11 Dec 2018, Elijah Newren wrote:

> I'm worried based on other emails in this thread that there is a
> fundamental difference in frame of reference leading to a
> misunderstanding about rationale for naming, and worse that folks might
> not even realize where the misunderstanding is coming from, attributing
> it to different motives rather than different frames of reference.  If
> that's true, I hope this email can begin the process of clearing up the
> differences of understanding.  If I'm wrong, then I apologize for the
> noise; just ignore me.

I think you brought up quite a few good points (also in the part that I
did not quote).

The part I quoted brings up one particular aspect that I would like to
drive home a little more: the purpose of naming, and the historical
reality. ("hysterical raisins" comes to mind.)

In Git, we have an awful lot of references to MINGW, which is the name of
a project that tried to allow compiling software targeting pure Windows
(i.e. the Win32 API, without any POSIX compatibility layer) with the GNU C
compiler.

As many open source projects require more than just the GNU C compiler
(e.g. a Bash to run ./configure), there is also MSys, which is a minimal
fork of a then-current version of Cygwin, originally intended for the sole
purpose to support building MINGW software.

To make things more confusing, at some stage the mingw-w64 project was
started (not as a fork of MINGW, AFAIU), to address the notable lack of
64-bit support in MINGW, and later the MSYS2 project was started, based on
mingw-w64, to address the same issue with MSys (also not forking, but
instead starting from scratch).

Back in 2006, when I started to port Git to Windows, I made use of MINGW
and MSys (and I abused MSys by shipping their Bash with Git, which was
distinctly not intended a usage of their Bash). Hannes Sixt picked up when
I stopped having access to a fast Windows machine, and kept my naming:
compat/mingw.c.

Now, Philip Oakley, Jeff Hostetler and a few other developers spent quite
a bit of effort to make Git compile also with Visual C, and of course the
reused parts of compat/mingw.c (whose name now does not make too much
sense anymore, except in historical context).

Likewise, when I switched to MSYS2/mingw-w64 with the major version jump
to Git for Windows 2.x in 2015, I no longer use MINGW to compile
*anything*.

I hope that this illustrated a little bit how our names came about.

Of course, we could now spend some time to change the names to reflect
more the product and brand names involved. There does not seem to be any
really compelling reason to do so, though. And I'd rather spend my time
developing exciting features. But that's my preference for my time, so if
anybody comes along, making a strong case for renaming, in a well-crafted
patch series, who am I to say no to that.

Ciao,
Dscho