From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:30:49 GMT
Subject: Carrying over attributes when moving files
Message-ID: <20100330213049.GB11192@progeny.tock>
In-Reply-To: <19377.33747.838003.360864@winooski.ccs.neu.edu>

Eli Barzilay wrote:

> There are a number of technicalities that make git attributes a poor
> substitute for svn properties -- mainly
[...]
> and
> the fact that they're not tracked with the files (as in svn, where
> moving a file somewhere will move its properties with it).

It would be great to improve this.

Consider the following directory hierarchy.

	old-files/
		.gitattributes
		some-file.html
		other-file.html
	new-files/
		unrelated-file.html

.gitattributes specifies that old HTML files use a CRLF line ending.

	*.html crlf

What would you expect the following commands to do?

	git mv old-files/some-file.html new-files/
	git commit

How about these?

	mv old-files/some-file.html new-files/
	git add new-files/some-file.html
	git commit -a

I don’t think there’s any fundamental reason this hasn’t been taken
care of; it’s just that nobody has done it yet.

Thoughts welcome.
Jonathan