Subject: Re: BUGREPORT: Modified files on a fresh clone on M2 MacBook Pro

From: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2023 21:45:37 -0700

Torsten Bögershausen <[email-masked]> writes:

> The general rule and recommendation would be to start the text attributes
> definition by using a "catch all" rule, followed by files that need
> special treatment.
> The very first text/binary line would be
> * text=auto
> which will tell Git to auto-detect all files (and file types),
> see below,
> This basically prevents corruption of binary files.
> which are not mentioned later.
> Like README.md, LICENCE and so on.
> Then there is a list of file extension, that are known to be binary,
> you can add them as shown below.

Thanks for writing this down clearly.

If I would add one thing to the general advice, it is that it
applies o those who are using Git primarily as their source code,
not binary asset, control system, which roughly translates to "for
most of the paths in the project, 'git diff' without using any
external diff driver is useful".  In such an environment,
"everything by default is text, and only selected few are not" would
work very well.  If on the other hand there are myriad of binary
asset of different types, it can become cumbersome to mark them "do
not try normalizing the eol, which is done to help cross platform
development" individually.