wrong handling of text git attribute leading to files incorrectly reported as modified

I’m not a git expert and this might be the wrong place to ask this question, so please send me somewhere else if I’m in the wrong place.

I asked the same question on stack overflow, but didn’t get any response: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22823004/files-incorrectly-reported-modified-git-attributes-buggy-leading-to-inconsist

If a file is committed with crlf line endings with the text attribute unset in the working tree, but the text attribute is set in the repo, the file will be incorrectly shown as modified - for all users checking out the file. Resetting or manually modifying the file will not help - The only remedy is to commit the .gitattributes with the text attribute set for the file.

Wouldn’t it be better to only consider the checked-in gitattributes instead of the attributes in the working tree? Is this a bug in git handling gitattributes or is this wrong usage? If it is wrong usage, is it documented anywhere?

The following shell script demonstrates the problem:

#!/bin/bash # creating a git repo "repo" rm -rf repo mkdir repo cd repo git init # committing gitattributes with text attribute set for all files echo "* text" > .gitattributes git add .gitattributes git commit -m "added .gitattributes" # add a file with CRLF line ending with text attribute unset echo -e "crlf\r" > crlffile echo "* -text" > .gitattributes git add crlffile git commit -m "added crlffile" git checkout .gitattributes # now "crlffile" shows as modified, even though it isn't. # only way to resolve is to modify .gitattributes git status crlffile # crlffile shown as modified. git checkout crlffile git status crlffile # crlffile shown as modified. git reset --hard git status # crlffile shown as modified. # git diff will report the CR as the difference git diff # but external diff reports no differences. git difftool --extcmd=diff --no-prompt

Thanks for your help Frank Ammeter