title: github/git Checkout Returns 'error: invalid path' on Windows
body: <p>When I attempt to checkout a repository from github I get the error:</p>
  <pre><code>error: invalid path 'configs/perl-modules/DIST.64/perl-HTML-Tree-1:5.03-1.el6.noarch.rpm'
  </code></pre>
  <p>I suspect the issue is that the path contains a : which is illegal on Windows.</p>
  <p>After researching the error, I've found 2 possible answers:<br>
  <strong>1) Change the path on the repository file.</strong>  Unfortunately, this is is a team resource and can not be fixed in the foreseeable future.  <br>
  <strong>2) Use sparse-checkout.</strong>  I've tried this with no effect as evidenced in the following:</p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>$ git clone -n git@github.com:XXXXXX/deploy.git <br>
  Cloning into 'deploy'... <br>
  remote: Enumerating objects: 57, done. <br>
  remote: Counting objects: 100% (57/57), done. <br>
  remote: Compressing objects: 100% (49/49), done. <br>
  remote: Total 86457 (delta 10), reused 22 (delta 8), pack-reused 86400 <br>
  Receiving objects: 100% (86457/86457), 1.50 GiB | 4.73 MiB/s, done. <br>
  Resolving deltas: 100% (59779/59779), done. <br>
  $ cd deploy/ <br>
  $ git config core.sparsecheckout true <br>
  $ echo www &gt;&gt; .git/info/sparse-checkout <br>
  $ git checkout centos6 <br>
  error: invalid path 'configs/perl-modules/DIST.64/perl-HTML-Tree-1:5.03-1.el6.noarch.rpm'<br>
  error: invalid path 'configs/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.24.1/man/man3/App::Cpan.3'<br>
  .<br>
  . (repeat for many files)<br>
  .<br></p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>This was done with Git for Windows &quot;git version 2.28.0.windows.1&quot;.  I have also tried both types of line endings and using various version of .git/info/sparse-checkout such as:</p>
  <pre><code>/*
  !/configs/perl-modules
  !/configs/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.24.1/man/man3
  </code></pre>
  <p>Checkout works fine on Linux, MacOS and WSL, only problem is that my IDEs don't work there.  Why isn't sparse-checkout working on Windows.  Is there any other possibilities?</p>