broken git clone with MSYS2 in Windows

[pedrolcl]

If you try to clone this sonivox repository in Windows using the MSYS2 provided git program, you may end with a corrupted working copy.

$ git clone -b devel https://github.com/pedrolcl/sonivox.git sonivox-devel-bad
Cloning into 'sonivox-devel-bad'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 4546, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (517/517), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (228/228), done.
remote: Total 4546 (delta 368), reused 333 (delta 269), pack-reused 4029
Receiving objects: 100% (4546/4546), 17.70 MiB | 27.93 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (2386/2386), done.
Updating files: 100% (268/268), done.

When building the project, you may see errors like this:

[1/2] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/SonivoxTest.dir/test/SonivoxTest.cpp.obj
FAILED: CMakeFiles/SonivoxTest.dir/test/SonivoxTest.cpp.obj 
D:\msys64\mingw64\bin\c++.exe  -ID:/Desktop/sonivox-devel/build -ID:/Desktop/sonivox-devel/arm-wt-22k/include -ID:/Desktop/sonivox-devel/fakes -ID:/Desktop/sonivox-devel/arm-wt-22k/include/libsonivox -ID:/Desktop/sonivox-devel/build/libsonivox -isystem D:/Desktop/sonivox-devel/build/_deps/googletest-src/googletest/include -isystem D:/Desktop/sonivox-devel/build/_deps/googletest-src/googletest -std=gnu++14 -MD -MT CMakeFiles/SonivoxTest.dir/test/SonivoxTest.cpp.obj -MF CMakeFiles\SonivoxTest.dir\test\SonivoxTest.cpp.obj.d -o CMakeFiles/SonivoxTest.dir/test/SonivoxTest.cpp.obj -c D:/Desktop/sonivox-devel/test/SonivoxTest.cpp
In file included from D:/Desktop/sonivox-devel/build/libsonivox/eas.h:38,
                 from D:/Desktop/sonivox-devel/test/SonivoxTest.cpp:25:
D:/Desktop/sonivox-devel/arm-wt-22k/include/libsonivox/eas_types.h:1:1: error: expected unqualified-id before '.' token
    1 | ../../host_src/eas_types.h
      | ^

This is what you get, instead of the repository content:

https://github.com/pedrolcl/sonivox/tree/devel/arm-wt-22k/include/libsonivox

The files in the include subdirectory should be symlinks. Instead, they are regular files that contain a single line with the relative path to the destination. Also, the type is "C++ header file" and the size is 1 KB. Both columns are wrong.

This is what it should look like:

The proper solution would be to avoid using the git program provided by msys2, and use some other windows git implementation. For instance, Git for windows: https://gitforwindows.org/, and then perform all Git operations with Git bash instead of the MSYS2 MINGW64 shortcut:

Other Git clients for windows may work as well, for instance Atlasian Sourcetree: https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/

To avoid other errors in the future, my advice is to remove the git program from MSYS2:

$ pacman -R git
checking dependencies...

Packages (1) git-2.44.0-1

Total Removed Size:  36.77 MiB

:: Do you want to remove these packages? [Y/n] y
:: Processing package changes...
(1/1) removing git                                           [###############################]