Re: .gittattributes handling has deficiencies

From: Steffen Prohaska <prohaska@zib.de>
Date: Oct 22, 2007, 13:04 UTC
Message-ID: <A524F676-BFFD-4AA7-8683-9623F12D2F2D@zib.de>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0710221125350.25221@racer.site>

On Oct 22, 2007, at 12:29 PM, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Show 24 quoted lines

>
> On Mon, 22 Oct 2007, Steffen Prohaska wrote:
>
>> .gitattributes is first looked for in the working directory, and  
>> if not
>> there, .gitattributes is read from the index.
>
> Of course we could change that to do it the other way round.  But this
> would contradict expectations when you edit .gitattributes and then
> checkout single files without having git-add'ed .gitattributes first.
>
> The biggest problem in your setup, however, is not  
> if .gitattributes is
> read from the index or the working directory.  The biggest problem  
> is that
> files are not touched when their contents have not changed.
>
> IOW if you have .gitattributes in the to-be-checked-out branch  
> which say
> that README is crlf, and in the current branch it is not, and README's
> _contents_ are identical in both branches, a "git checkout
> <that-other-branch>" will not rewrite README, and consequently not  
> change
> the working copy to crlf.

Exactly. The order of reading .gitattributes from the working directory or the index doesn't matter. The current mechanism has a more fundamental deficiency.

Changes of.gitattributes can influence how the same content is checked out to the work tree. If .gitattributes change the checkout may need to be updated, even if the real content did not change.

	Steffen