Re: About git reporting missing newline for symlinks

From: Ignacio Taranto <ignacio.taranto@eclypsium.com>
Date: Oct 12, 2022, 21:42 UTC
Message-ID: <CAAHd=zd2fRAiW4tZa-yCie3tGMzcmye-75_b1tcYtMTyf1Li2A@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq7d14k9uh.fsf@gitster.g>

That was very well explained, thank you.

The problem seems to be that some people interpret this message as a real warning since it's often a good practice to always end text files with a newline (at least on *nix systems). Of course this doesn't apply to symlinks at all.

On Wed, Oct 12, 2022 at 6:31 PM Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 28 quoted lines

>
> Ignacio Taranto <ignacio.taranto@eclypsium.com> writes:
>
> > So, both git diff and git show display "\ No newline at end of file"
> > for symlinks.
> >
> > I think this is related to how Git renders diffs, IMO it shouldn't
> > display a warning about newlines for symlinks.
> >
> > Am I making any sense here?
>
> Yes, but not really.
>
> It is not "warning" at all.  The users want to know when compared
> contents do or do not end with an incomplete line at the end, and
> the "\ No newline" is the diff's way to give that single bit of
> information to us.
>
> And the contents of a symbolic link typically is a single incomplete
> line, so it is expected to see "\ No newline" when comparing them.
>
> This is important as "git diff | git -C ../some/where/else apply"
> should be able to recreate the change in the current repository
> (which may have change to or addition of a symbolic link) in the
> other repository, and "git apply" on the receiving end must be able
> to tell that the symbolic link it needs to create in the other
> repository must not have an extra LF at the end.
>