Subject: Cygwin: Initial clone of repo containing .gitattributes has modified files

From: Raman Gupta <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:47:34 -0400

When a repository containing a .gitattributes file, which contains
other files with -crlf set is cloned on cygwin, with autocrlf = true,
the initial checkout of the working copy sets the line endings for the
-crlf files incorrectly (it ignores the .gitattributes, presumably
because it hasn't been checked out yet).

After the checkout has been done, git does correctly mark the files
with -crlf as "modified" and a simple reset --hard fixes it, but this
is very confusing for the user as the user has not done anything -- it
is git itself that has "modified" the file by not assigning the
correct line endings.

Reproduction recipe (on a cygwin binmode mount):

---------------------------------------------------
$ git --version
git version 1.6.1.2
$ git config --global core.autocrlf true
$ git config --global core.safecrlf true
$ mkdir temp.git; cd temp.git; git init
$ cat | unix2dos > file_dos
DOS
line
endings
^D
$ cat > file_unix
UNIX
line
endings
^D
$ cat > .gitattributes
.gitattributes -crlf
file_unix -crlf
^D
$ git add .gitattributes *
$ git commit -m "Test"
$ cd ..
$ git clone temp.git tempclone.git
$ cd tempclone.git
$ git status
...
#      modified:  .gitattributes
#      modified:  file_unix
...
---------------------------------------------------

Also, in a related issue, git on cygwin requires .gitattributes itself
to be included in .gitattributes, otherwise with safecrlf = true you get:

$ git add .gitattributes
fatal: LF would be replaced by CRLF in .gitattributes

(since .gitattributes created with a cygwin editor on a binmode mount
uses unix line endings)

Cheers,
Raman Gupta