Re: Unresolved issues

From: Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org>
Date: Feb 21, 2007, 17:05 UTC
Message-ID: <20070221170539.GI25559@spearce.org>
In-Reply-To: <09D527A1-43E2-41A1-AC46-71F64BC409C2@silverinsanity.com>

Brian Gernhardt <benji@silverinsanity.com> wrote:

Show 17 quoted lines

> It seems to me that a tracked .gitattributes file should have things  
> like
> 
> *.txt: text
> *.gif: binary
> *.[ch]: text
> 
> And the .git/config should have
> 
> [attribute "text"]
>    mangle = crlf
> 
> [attribute "binary"]
>    merge = none
> 
> The type of each file should be tracked, but what to do with each  
> type is a local issue.  Trying to merge the two is madness.

Yes, exactly.  :-)

I would also recommend that we encourage use of standard MIME types to define the file types, but don't enforce it. Thus I can setup something like:

  cat >.gitattributes <<EOF
  *.txt: text/plain
  *.java: text/java-source
  *.xml: text/xml
  *.bin: mycompany-binary
  EOF

  cat >>.git/config <<EOF
  [attribute "text/*"]
    mangle = crlf
  [attribute "text/xml"]
    merge = better-xml-mergething
  [attribute "mycompany-binary"]
    mangle = no
    merge = mycompany-binarymerge
  EOF

And have all three classes of files be mangled with CRLF, but XML files are also merged with the external merge process, and the special type mycompany-binary might be a local file format that comes with its own merge tools, but is not exactly a registered MIME type.

One advantage here is we can setup attribute.text/*.mangle=crlf on Windows platforms by default for users, as we can reasonably assume all text content falls into this MIME type...

-- 
Shawn.