Re: Merge conflicts in .gitattributes can cause trouble

> Hi,
>
>
> If there is a conflict in the .gitattributes during a merge then it looks
> like as if the attributes are not applied (which kind of makes sense as Git
> would not know what to do). As a result Git can treat e.g. binary files
> as text and they can end up with changed line endings in the working tree.
> After resolving the conflict in .gitattributes all files would be marked
> as binary, again, and the user can easily commit the wrongly changed line
> endings.
>
> Consider this script on Windows:
>
> $ git init .
> $ touch first.commit
> $ git add .
> $ git commit -m "first commit"
>
> $ git checkout -b branch
> $ printf "*.bin binary\n" >> .gitattributes
> $ git add .
> $ git commit -m "tracking *.bin files"
>
> $ git checkout master
> $ printf "binary\ndata\n" > file.dat # <-- Unix line ending!
> $ printf "*.dat binary\n" >> .gitattributes # <-- Tell Git to keep Unix line ending!
> $ git add .
> $ git commit -m "tracking *.dat files"
> $ git cat-file -p :file.dat | od -c
> 0000000   b   i   n   a   r   y  \n   d   a   t   a  \n
>                                 ^^^^                ^^^^  <-- Correct!
> $ git checkout branch
> $ git merge master # <-- Causes merge conflict!
> $ printf "*.bin binary\n*.dat binary\n" > .gitattributes # <-- Fix merge conflict!
> $ git add .
> $ git commit -m "merged"
> $ git cat-file -p :file.dat | od -c
> 0000000   b   i   n   a   r   y  \r  \n   d   a   t   a  \r  \n
>                                 ^^^^^^^^                ^^^^^^^^  <-- Wrong!
>
> Possible solutions:
>
> 1. We could print an appropriate warning if we detect a merge conflict
>    in .gitattributes

> 2. We could disable all line ending conversions in case of a merge conflict
>    (I am not exactly sure about all the implications, though)
>
> 3. We could salvage what we could of the .gitattributes file,
>    perhaps by using the version from HEAD (or more likely, the ours stage of
>    the index) -- suggested by Peff on the related GitHub issue mentioned below