Re: [PATCH] whitespace: symbolic links usually lack LF at the end

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Feb 5, 2026, 15:50 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqms1nmbog.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <aYSLP1LqBiMwur3O@pks.im>

Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> I'd suggest that we only disable this check in case either:
>
>   - One side doesn't exist, the other is a symbolic link.
>
>   - Both sides are a symbolic link.

Hmm. That is indeed a thoguht. But we do not want to complain in text-to-symlink transition that postimage lacks the terminating LF, so the above rules may be a good start but will need further tweaking, I am afraid.

> Another question is whether we support symref targets that end in a
> newline. I guess the answer is going to be some form of "yes", and in
> that case we could of course loose some information. But honestly, this
> is so much of an edge case that I don't really worry about it too much.

Do we track, apply and diff any symrefs? I thought that we do not touch anything inside .git/ and symrefs live inside .git/refs/ (except for .git/HEAD)?