Re: About git reporting missing newline for symlinks

From: brian m. carlson <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>
Date: Oct 12, 2022, 21:32 UTC
Message-ID: <Y0cyX8Ggp+dkgAjX@tapette.crustytoothpaste.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAAHd=zcrU3VJro1R3xDj3hmqGXZHUA6rHuDFxwhF5aewNvA8xQ@mail.gmail.com>

On 2022-10-12 at 21:17:04, Ignacio Taranto wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> 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?

What Git shows for a symlink is the destination of the symlink. On Unix systems other than macOS, path names may contain any byte other than NUL, including a newline.

While it obviously is not a good practice to include newlines in your paths, it is possible, and Git would not be able to round-trip symlinks where the final character of the destination is a newline if we didn't handle trailing newlines properly. As a result, we're not likely to change things here because it's required for correctness.

-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA