Re: [RFR] gitattributes(5) documentation

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Apr 20, 2007, 01:45 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.98.0704191835290.9964@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vslav4yv6.fsf_-_@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

Great. And reading the documentation, something struck me: wonderful docs about crlf, but it became clear that either the docs are wrong, or the behaviour is less than optimal: you cannot specify "crlf=input" any way?

So I would sugegst that
 - if crlf is set, we still honor the value of "core.autocrlf", we just 
   don't care about the *content*.

Maybe that's what the code is doing (I thought it did, but I'm too lazy to check), but the docs don't say that:

On Thu, 19 Apr 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> 
> Set::
> 	A path to which the `crlf` attribute is set is converted
> 	to have CRLF line endings in the working tree upon
> 	checkout, and converted back to strip CRLF line endings
> 	to LF line endings upon checkin.

This documented behaviour is non-optimal for a few reasons:
 - it makes it impossible to say "this is text", and have it work on UNIX 
   platforms ;)
 - it makes it impossible to have "autocrlf=input", and then correct one 
   single file that was incorrectly guessed to be binary, and have that 
   file behave like other files.

So I _think_ the right rules are:

 - unspecified: use autocrlf *and* content detection logic
 - unset: never do crlf<->lf ("binary")
 - set: use autocrlf without content detection logic ("text")

with possibly an added rule:

 - set to value: "true" or "input" force that particular setting 
   *regardless* of autocrlf, ie we'd always get CRLF even on UNIX.

Hmm?

			Linus