Native commands not working on Cygwin

[xpusostomos]

I've long pointed out here that the cygwin version of bash is a perfectly fine version of bash, and as long as you don't pollute any variables with unixy paths (if you don't want that), there is absolutely no reason it shouldn't work.

Well low and behold, a few months back, cygwin started working again! And there was rejoicing in the land! And indeed it still works!!

Well kinda, it works on my old machine. But when I go to install it on a new machine, it doesn't work. Seemingly ... because it doesn't install ~/.sdkman/libexec executables. My old machine has those executables, and it works fine with cygwin.

So the documentation alleges that it works with MSYS2/Mingw bash. So I installed that, then installed sdkman again, and same thing... it doesn't work, and no libexec subfolder.

Now if I do set -x on my old machine, and do sdk help, it detects libexec, and calls the help executable to output help. But on the new installation it doesn't detect it, and it echos via bash all the help text.

It seems to me, that someone needs to do some very trivial work to detect cygwin, and/or MSYS2, and simply install libexec, and then the people in the land can go back to rejoicing again.

[marc0der]

Hi @xpusostomos, any help in this regard would be greatly appreciated! If my memory serves me right, the native binaries don't work on Cygwin because of how Rust interprets file paths on Windows. It doesn't treat them universally, which causes all native commands working with paths to break on Cygwin. My testing showed that it did work with MSYS2/Mingw. Please correct me if I'm wrong here. I'd also love to get this working, so please let me know if I'm totally missing it and let's see if we can fix it.

[xpusostomos]

@marc0der I'm happy to help any way I can. My understanding is that at some point it stopped workin in cygwin because somewhere or other, the shell scripts passed a cygwin path into the executable (.i.e. something like /cygwin/c/home/... etc, rather than what it wants which is c:/Users/... ... however then later, after saying they won't fix it, it seemed to start working again.

I don't know how it manages to work now despite this problem. I think, based on what I see, that the script checks if the rust programs exist, and if they don't, falls back to .sh scripts in the src directory. Although that doesn't explain the above bug report which seems to be requiring rust programs. I only have 5 programs in my libexec folder, default.exe, help, home, uninstall and version.... but running the script it seems like it's looking for other programs like use, install etc corresponding to sdk commands, but not finding them and falling back to .sh scripts in src/

I do know that I don't think there is a reason it can't work with rust programs, because, your home directory comes into the system via SDKMAN_DIR environment variable, which you could set to C:/home/blah, and from then on, everything in SDKMAN ought to be based from that, and as long as you don't pollute your paths from the shell with pwd or something, everything should be fine, since the CYGWIN shell behaves like any other shell in terms of running commands. The only way you could get into trouble is if you generate a new path from root, which I can't see any reason for. After all, windows happily accepts forward slash, it just doesn't like /c/ as a root.

Having said that, my SDKMAN_DIR is set from $HOME, which will be a cygwinism, and yet it still works anyway. Like I said, it seems to fall back to shell rather than rust, but I can't be sure.

However, sdk version is failing for me... presumably because I DO have a version.exe in my libexec folder.

Hmm... I just changed in my .bashrc SDKMAN_DIR to be C:/Users/chris rather than $HOME (aka /c/home/chris), and now sdk version works. So my theory that merely fixing that variable in one's .bashrc is all that's needed, seems plausible.

One could detect and use the cygpath program to convert unix paths to windows paths, though I don't see the need for it if one writes careful code.

So here is my summary...

1. Even though I just did an sdk update, I seem to lack all the rust executables, or at least I assume so, but I don't know what to expect to find.

2. I think the rust executables will probably work fine if your SDKMAN_DIR is rooted in C:/ rather than /c or some such, but I haven't the ability to test them all. If that's all that's required, it seems a minor ask to have that specially catered for in the install. Or at least instructions to set it yourself.

3. Right now sdkman seems to fall back to scripts, but I don't know if that's partly because I have an old installation or whether that continues to be some support given

4. my .sdkman/bin/sdkman-init.sh mentions cywin a number of times for whatever that is worth.