Re: What should be the CRLF policy when win + Linux?

From: hasen j <hasan.aljudy@gmail.com>
Date: May 6, 2010, 20:00 UTC
Message-ID: <h2x600158c31005061300tfe485e01x251ae20b22ef5b27@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.2.00.1005061009020.901@i5.linux-foundation.org>

On 6 May 2010 11:15, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

Show 29 quoted lines

>
>
> On Thu, 6 May 2010, hasen j wrote:
>>
>> I don't know all linux editors, but I've yet to see one that can't
>> handle CRLF endings.
>
> A _lot_ of UNIX editors will handle CRLF endings, but if you change a
> file, they often write the result back with _mixed_ endings. Some will
> also show the CR as '^M' or some other garbage at the end.
>
> A number of tools will also end up confused, including very fundamental
> things like "grep". Try this:
>
>        echo -e "Hello\015" > f
>        grep 'Hello$' f
>
> and notice how the grep does _not_ find the Hello at the end of the line,
> because grep sees another random character there (this might be
> unportable, I could easily imagine some versions of grep finding it).
>
> So I would strongly suggest against CRLF on UNIX. It really doesn't work
> very well, even if some tools will handle it to some limited degree.
>
> In short: having 'core.autocrlf' set will likely make it much more
> pleasant to work across different platforms.
>
>                        Linus
>

When I'm on windows, I prefer LF (unless the project already uses CRLF, or it's outside my control).

VB is very windowsy; I *really* doubt most VB developers use (or even know) grep, so I don't think it's a problem if a VB project standardizes line endings to be CRLF.

My problem with autocrlf is that, well, it converts line endings in the working directory to CRLF, even though I don't always want it to. (most of the time, I don't).

The other problem is, git will get confused if you set autocrlf *after the fact*; i.e. you already cloned and have the files checked out, maybe even made some commits.

Overall, I ran into many awkward situations with autocrlf (and I can't remember them now), but if you google you can find some of the issues people are having.

The whole problem would go away if there was no crlf, and that's not impossible: any decent text editor can read/write files with Unix line endings.

I wasn't aware that Visual Studio doesn't have an easy way to have it write LF endings by default; I'm sure there are addons to make that easier. Plus most open source projects are not usually setup with VS as the development environment anyway, so it's really not a big problem.

So yeah, I think LF everywhere is the better way to go most of the time.