on Cygwin ECL does not handle case-sensitve paths well

[dimpase]

ECLs call

> (directory "")

must always return the current directory. On Cygwin, sometimes one gets NIL. One example is like this: say, a user John has Windows (domain) login name John, but Cygwin will create for him home directory "/home/john".
At this point, one might hit the Win32 case-sensitivity weirdness, and in particular installation scripts for Maxima spkg will fail in a subdirectory containing "/home/john". If one switches on case-sensitivity, as described in the link just cited, the problem goes away.

In a nutshell, while this remains unfixed, avoid building Sage in directories with names containing capitals. This was uncovered and mentioned here.

Upstream: Reported upstream. No feedback yet.

Component: porting: Cygwin

Issue created by migration from https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/13343

[jpflori]

comment:1

Could this be related to #9167?

[jpflori]

comment:2

I've mentioned the uppercase path problem on the CygwinPort page, just in case someone else wants to join the experience.

[dimpase]

comment:3

Replying to @jpflori:

Could this be related to #9167?

I think one cannot rule this out just by reading comments on #9167.
Note capitals (e.g. SageUser) in some paths mentioned there.

[kcrisman]

comment:4

I decided not to use a an uppercase path this time, on the same machine, and didn't encounter any problems. I won't have the chance to try #9167 until after the weekend, but at any rate that's a positive sign.

I think it would be ok to even put this in prereq for a first start (i.e. ban such paths at the start of a build), since Cygwin would not be a typical building platform, but rather one we would specially use to create binaries only.

[jpflori]

comment:5

Just for the report, the build I did recently on a 32 bits Windows 7 (Intel Atom something) took place in the home dir of a user with a capital first letter "/cygwin/home/Toto/sage-5.7" and I had no problems whatsoever.
It was even the more functional build I ever got so easily! (In part because I had no memory leaks on this machine.)

[embray]

comment:10

I'm pretty sure this is no longer an issue. Lots has changed since this was first reported, and among other things Cygwin does not force your home directory to be lower-case.

I've never seen the problem either, though I do usually mount my Cygwin home directory to an all lower-case, no-space name. So feel free to reopen if it recurs.