Re: mingw, windows, crlf/lf, and git

Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:

Btw, how would I implement this? If I really were energetic enough to 
implement it, I would do:

 (a) Add a flag to "git-ls-files" logic to add "type information" in 
     front.

     Not only do you want this *anyway* for other reasons, but for
     binary/text, the thing you actually care most about is "git add", and 
     it already basically just does "take this file pattern, feed it 
     through git-ls-files, and add those files". So you'd get it basically 
     for free.

     It is also fairly easy to add at this stage, because you can simply 
     look for all the places that work with "info/exclude" and 
     ".gitignore", and you know that "Ahh, I need to teach these exact 
     places to understand about attributes". So you'd add an 
     "add_attributes_from_file()" function etc etc.

     Quite straightforward. In fact, you might be able to use the 
     gitignore parsing *as*is*, and just teach it about more flags that 
     just "ignore": both in "struct dir_entry" and in "struct exclude".

 (b) Teach the git-update-index logic about hashing text blobs.

I agree that we can assume editors can grok files with LF
end-of-line just fine and we would not need to do the reverse
conversion on checkout paths (e.g. "read-tree -u", "checkout-index").

Textual diff generation needs to learn the CRLF-to-LF conversion
in diff_populate_filespec(); this needs to be done even when the
caller wants size_only.

Oops.

Not so fast.  What's your plan for st_size?

 (c) Profit!

It really should be fairly straightforward. I'm sure it wouldn't be 
*entirely* trivial, but I'm also fairly sure that somebody reasonably 
competent could do it in a couple of days (with testing) if they were just 
sufficiently motivated to get started.

Anybody?

Not me.