Re: [PATCH] Respect crlf attribute even if core.autocrlf has not been set

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 10:56:04PM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

When a file's crlf attribute is explicitely set, it does not make sense
to ignore it, just because the config variable core.autocrlf has not
been set.

Hmm... About a week ago, I was about to propose the same change, but
after reading documentation and some thinking I was not able to convince
myself that this change would be the right thing to do.

First, let's look at what Git's documentation says:

===
`crlf`
^^^^^^

This attribute controls the line-ending convention.

Set::

	Setting the `crlf` attribute on a path is meant to mark
	the path as a "text" file.  'core.autocrlf' conversion
	takes place without guessing the content type by
	inspection.

<snip>

The `core.autocrlf` conversion
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

If the configuration variable `core.autocrlf` is false, no
conversion is done.
===

So, my reading is that if I set the `crlf` attribute on some path, but
I have core.autocrlf=false, there will be no conversion.

And this can be used to mark text files in .gitattribute, which is
stored in the repository and thus it is shared among users with
different end-of-line ending, i.e. you can have something like this
in .gitattribute:

*.[ch] crlf
*.txt crlf

but on Unix, you have core.autocrlf=false, so no conversion is done,
while, on Windows, you set core.autocrlf=true, so you will have crlf
conversion without any guessing.

Now, I can agree with you that using the 'crlf' attribute to mark text
files may appear not very intuitive (you may expect that crlf means that
those files always need crlf conversion), but right now we do not have
any better way to mark text files and the using crlf in this role is
explicitly suggested by documentation. See above.

s/heeded/needed/


Dmitry