bug with .gitattributes diff and embedded NUL

The man page for gitattributes suggests that one use of the diff attribute is to force text-based diffs, even when the file contains embedded NULs. Yet actually trying this falls flat, since git generates invalid diffs when encountering embedded NUL.

Here is a pared-down example showing the bug. I based it off of what I was trying to do in the git repository for GNU m4, where I was working on adding testcases to make m4 seamlessly handle embedded NUL.

$ git --version
git version 1.5.4.rc0.67.gf9c5
$ mkdir sample
$ cd sample
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in .git/
$ printf 'context with\0embedded nul\nbefore\nmore context\n' > file
$ git add file
$ git commit -m initial
Created initial commit 25108f6: initial
 1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 file
$ git tag t1
$ sed -i 's/before/after/' file
$ git add file
$ git commit -m later
Created commit a5ee10c: later
 1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
$ git tag t2
$ git reset --hard t1
HEAD is now at 25108f6... initial
$ sed -i 's/more/some &/' file
$ echo 'file diff' > .gitattributes
$ git add .gitattributes file
$ git commit -m 'switch file to text mode'
Created commit 0f2a9b2: switch file to text mode
 2 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 .gitattributes
$ git tag t3
$ git reset --hard t2
HEAD is now at a5ee10c... later
$ git rebase --onto t3 t1
First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...
HEAD is now at 0f2a9b2... switch file to text mode
Applying later
error: patch failed: file:1
error: file: patch does not apply
Using index info to reconstruct a base tree...
error: patch failed: file:1
error: file: patch does not apply
Did you hand edit your patch?
It does not apply to blobs recorded in its index.
Cannot fall back to three-way merge.
Patch failed at 0001.

When you have resolved this problem run "git rebase --continue". If you would prefer to skip this patch, instead run "git rebase --skip". To restore the original branch and stop rebasing run "git rebase --abort".

Looking closer at .dotest/0001, the diff is indeed invalid, containing the single line

 context with-before

instead of the desired two lines

 context with^@embedded nul
-before

I'm also wondering if using GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF would provide a way to work around this bug in git diff, since GNU diffutils doesn't seem to have any problems when doing text-mode diffs with embedded NUL:

$ diff -u -a <(git show t1:file) <(git show t2:file) | cat -v --- /dev/fd/63 2006-11-30 17:00:00.000000000 -0700 +++ /dev/fd/62 2006-11-30 17:00:00.000000000 -0700

Eric Blake <ebb9@byu.net> writes:

That is not a bug in diff but actually in bug in non-merge form of rebase, which reuses "format patch as if we are sending it out in e-mail, and apply that on top of a different commit as if we are accepting that e-mail" machinery. That dataflow loses NUL. Fixing rebase not to reuse the e-mailed patch dataflow is on my to-do list, but has been slipping.

So, no, I do not think GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF would help, as the problem is not diff generation.

I think you can use "rebase -m" to work this issue around.

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According to Junio C Hamano on 12/18/2007 11:40 PM:

Indeed, after learning about git-rebase -m and git-mergetool, adding the merge option alongside the diff option for the file in question, and teaching emacs that it should use emerge-diff-options "-a" so that it can handle embedded NUL, I was finally able to use git-mergetool to do a sane merge of the differences in the mostly-text file. Thanks!

But it raised some additional issues:

Is there a way to specify custom merge tools, rather than the current hard-coded list valid for merge.tool? For example, what if I prefer emacs' ediff driver over its emerge driver?

Using merge.tool of emerge leaves junk around when the merge is aborted. Before I edited emacs' emerge-diff-options, the subsidiary diff3 was failing because it treated the file to merge as binary even though git was trying to treat it as text. As a result, emerge left behind all of its command-line argument files (file.{BASE,LOCAL,REMOTE}.pid), and git did not clean any of them up.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             ebb9@byu.net
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