Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] attr: fix attribute handling if .gitattributes is involved

From: [email-masked] (Brian Downing)
Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2007 20:51:15 -0500

On Sun, Aug 12, 2007 at 10:34:34PM +0200, Steffen Prohaska wrote:
> This together with the patch that follows fixes a problem, which
> is most likely to bite Windows users. I recognized it by setting
> autocrlf globally to true and doing a fresh checkout of msysgit.
> The checkout contained etc/termcap converted to CRLF, although
> is was marked as '-crlf' in etc/.gitattributes.
> 
> If we believe autocrlf is a reasonable default for Windows users,
> we really should use it ourselves, to find such problems. 
> 
> The fixed problem is not really critical but may be quite annoying,
> and complex to understand.

I have a case in a live repository where this is not merely annoying.

I have a test data in one of my repositories that must never be
converted.  It has a mix of Unix and Windows line-endings in it.  I
marked the appropriate files with the "-crlf" attribute.

With the current git behavior, cloning this repository with "autocrlf"
globally set irreversably corrupts the files (converting the LF
line-enders to CRLF) on checkout.  If the user is careless upon commit,
these corrupted files will then be committed back (probably with all
CRLFs, since at that point the .gitattributes is present and the -crlf
attribute will be honored.)

There is kind of an ugly chicken-and-egg problem here, but I think it
would be good to figure it out to avoid this kind of broken behavior.

I would also vote for this handling to be in the plumbing, since the
autocrlf processing is in the plumbing as well.

Another thing to consider with respect to attribute access -- It would
be nice for git-cvsserver to be able to send the correct -k option to
the remote side for line endings.  Doing this correctly involves
accessing attributes, but git-cvsserver never has a full working
directory.  Having the attribute machinery work without a working
directory (either directly from trees or from an index) would be a great
benefit here.

-bcd