Re: core.autocrlf & Cygwin - files incorrectly flagged as modified

From: Tay Ray Chuan <rctay89@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 17, 2009, 01:05 UTC
Message-ID: <be6fef0d0912161705q1ef23634rccdc170d69cf9484@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <loom.20091215T225528-115@post.gmane.org>

Hi,

On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 6:24 AM, David Antliff <david.antliff@gmail.com> wrote:

> I suspect what is happening is that the line conversion routine in git might be
> stripping trailing whitespace, as well as converting the line endings. This
> operation is not properly accounted for in the reverse direction, and the file
> is flagged as modified.

I am not a Git expert, but could it be your editor on Windows?

Not just stripping whitespace; it might be setting the eol to LF (instead of CRLF) when saving the file.

Show 5 quoted lines

> Also, as cloned files are converted to DOS-line-endings, by default Cygwin's
> bash cannot run any scripts as they have the wrong line endings. I have to set
> the 'permanent' bash variable SHELLOPTS to include 'igncr' before bash scripts
> can run. Perhaps this is wrong and git on Cygwin (with binary mounts) should be
> converting to UNIX line endings instead?

Again, IANAGE, but according to the manual, this should be expected, because Git, when writing to the filesystem, converts LF to CRLF:

  If true, makes git convert CRLF at the end of lines in text files to
  LF when reading from the filesystem, and convert in reverse when
  writing to the filesystem.

> At one point I tried switching off core.autocrlf for myself but this caused a
> lot of conflicts due to mismatched line-endings. It seems to me that if we want
> to switch to this, *everyone* has to do it at once.

Just make this conversion a commit, and depending on your project's workflow, push/pull it.

Although the whole file will be marked as changed, you can always double-check that only whitespace changes have been made by running git-diff with --ignore-space-at-eol or -b.

-- 
Cheers,
Ray Chuan