Re: [PATCH] treat any file with NUL as binary

> There are two heuristics in Git to detect whether a file is binary
> or text. One in xdiff-interface.c relied on existing NUL byte at
> the beginning. However, convert.c used a different heuristic, which
> relied that the number of non-printable symbols is less than 1%.
>
> Due to difference in approaches whether a file is binary or not,
> it was possible that a file that diff treats as binary will not be
> treated as text by CRLF conversation. This is very confusing for
> a user who seeing that 'git diff' shows file as binary expects it
> to be added as binary.
>
> This patch makes is_binary to consider any file that contains at
> least one NUL character as binary.

> ---
>
> Junio,
>
> I believe that the current behavior where 'git diff' shows me a file
> as binary and then adds it as text with crlf conversation is a bug.
>
> Though, it is not very likely to happen, it still possible cases where
> a binary file contains large amount of text. For instance, a tar file
> of text files can be such a file. Probably, word processor that store
> text in binary format may also generate a file with more 99% printable
> characters. So, such files will be considered as text by current  
> convert
> heuristic. Still such files are considered by diff due present of a  
> NUL
> character. This is very confusing for a user to see 'git diff' saying
> that a file is binary and then having it converted as text. Because I
> don't think that any real text file (especially one that requires CRLF
> conversation) may contain NUL character, I believe this change should
> improve binary heuristic and avoid user confusion.