Subject: Re: Bug report: .gitattributes: -diff Unset causes files to be reported as binaries

From: Paolo Bonzini <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:12:28 +0200

>> So as far as I can see, git is behaving exactly as it is supposed to.
>> Maybe you can be more specific about what effect you were trying to
>> achieve by setting gitattributes in the first place?
>
> To exclude it in diffs, such as from `git show`. Take the case where you have
> a grammar file for a parser and generate a source file from it(or any similar
> scenario); the diff for the generated source file is not of interest and is
> just noisy when read as part of a patch. This applies to all kinds of
> generated files. However, this doesn't mean that the file should be treated
> as a binary, and what practicalities that implies.

I am not sure it is a good idea, but you can do this with

FILE diff=/bin/true

> If -diff affects whether a file is treated as a binary, as opposed whether
> it's diff'ed, it would imo make sense to call it -binary.

No, diff affects how a file is diffed.  The particular setting "-diff" 
diffs the file as if it was binary.

Paolo