Re: [PATCH v1 0/1] t6038-merge-text-auto.sh

tboegi@web.de writes:

The two comment you quoted is absolutely the right thing to do. "In a merge, we sometimes need to look at 'theirs'" is like saying "When we are dong 'git add', we need to look at what is in the working tree". It is total red herring.

Step back and think why we even look at what in the index in the first place; it is to decide if we want or do not want to disable the automatic CRLF -> LF conversion. And think again the reason why do we look at the index.

There may be a line with CRLF line endings in the new contents, whether it came from a merge, cherry-pick, patch application, or plain-simple "git add" from the working tree. Auto-CRLF usually says "We want CRLF turned into LF". But the user misconfigured and for this path the user might not want the conversion take place, in which case you would disable the conversion. Where do you take that hint "the user might have misconfigured?" from? By looking at what the user _started_ her update from. If the state before this "we need to replace the blob in the index with a new contents, so we need to hash the new contents to come up with the updated blob" started contains CRLF already, that may be a hint--if we apply the CRLF->LF conversion on the original, even if the "new contents" were identical to what she already had, we would end up changing the blob with her current configuration. Hence we disable.

Isn't that the reasoning behind that "safe auto-crlf" thing?

The new contents getting integrated into her current state may have CRLF, and if a merge or a cherry-pick leaves conflicts, they may be stored in stage #3. But paying attention to that to decide if we want to disable Auto-CRLF conversion is simply wrong; you should look at the CRLF in stage #3 as purely something that might need to be converted, not something that affects the decision if it needs to be converted, just like you view CRLF in a working tree file when you do "git add"..

Imagine that you started from a history where somebody recorded a text file with CRLF in the blob, unconverted. Later the project decided to express their text with LF to support cross-platform development better, and sets up the Auto-CRLF. Your user is working near the tip of that history after the eol correction happened. Now she gets a pull-request of a branch that forked from an old point in the history, before the eol correction and full of CRLF. Yes, to integrate the change being proposed, she needs to look at "theirs"; that's the whole point of a "merge". Why should she revert the eol correction her history has by getting fooled by the fact that the update was based on a part of the history before the eol correction?