Hi,
I am asking myself if git and .gitattributes should be more stateless?
i.e.
whatever you have done before is irrelevant, when you reach status XYZ
with your
git repo, it is EXACTLY and BINARY the same all the time and
everywhere.
It took some time for me to figure out, that depending on HOW you
clone, the
resulting local repo may differ. I did not expect this. I assumed that
when I
clone, it is a clone (meaning: 100% identical). And that the things I
have done
in my local repo before, don't have any relevance at all.
You don't say which parts you believe should be identical, nor why.
Internally Git can represent its object store in many ways based on some
objects being 'loose' and some objects being 'packed'. However both
styles of representation are of the same base objects and their
contents.
Then we have external OS representation, in particular the end of line
representations between the three main OS types Win/Mac/'nix. Git gives
_you_ the ability the use any of these representations for the same base
objects. Thus the object file with text "Hello World/EOL/Goodbye World"
will have three different binary representations once you export them to
the selected file system type (according to you .gitattributes
settings).
If you always select LF endings for text files (both on the way in and
on the way out of the repo), then you will get identical files on the
different clones. Git has many settings for personalisation.
Does that help?
** How to reproduce **
1) create a repo, add a file with LF ending, add a .gitattributes
telling git to
do a CRLF conversion
2) clone the repo
3) on brach development, change .gitattributes to LF
4) clone again
5) clone again, directly onto the branch development (git clone -b)
** Expected result, (I) **
clone 2) and original repo 1) are bytewise identical
** Actual result (I) **
clone 2) and original repo 1) differ, 1) has LF, 2) has CRLF
as I have been warned before, I am (more or less) fine/OK with this
** Expected result, (II) **
- clone without -b (4) and clone with -b (5) are bytewise identical
- I would have expected, that whatever I do, as soon as I have a clone
and I am
on branch "development", my file should be LF
- I would have expected, that HOW you clone is irrelevant
** Actual result (II) **
without -b (4) I have a CRLF file on my disk. with -b (5) I have a LF
file on my
disk. The clones are not bytewise indentical. It appears as if the
.gitattributes in branch development does not have any reliable
effect.
A potential solution might be be that
- checkout
- commit (a modified .gitattribues)
- <further git commands>
do change the files in the local repo.
As of now my understanding is that this is not how .gitattributes (or
.gitignore) are designed. .gitattributes only has influence on
pushing/fetching.
I don't know if and which side effects would occur if this design
would be
changed. Hence I am glad to hear any feedback on the issue described
above. And
yes, I agree that this is a minor issue and that all .gitattribute
things are
kind of edge cases.
Thanks and with best regards,
Max
1)
mkdir git-bug-or-feature
cd git-bug-or-feature
git init
echo "foo.bar eol=crlf" > .gitattributes
echo "hello world" > foo.bar
git add .
git commit -m "now crlf"
# [master (root-commit) 7f3f6b0] now crlf
# warning: LF will be replaced by CRLF in foo.bar.
# The file will have its original line endings in your working
directory.
file foo.bar
# foo.bar: ASCII text
cd ..
2)
git clone git-bug-or-feature git-bug-or-feature_clone
cd git-bug-or-feature_clone
file foo.bar
# foo.bar: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
cd ..
rm -rf git-bug-or-feature_clone
3)
cd git-bug-or-feature
git branch development
git checkout development
echo "foo.bar eol=lf" > .gitattributes
git add .
git commit -m "now lf on branch development"
file foo.bar
# foo.bar: ASCII text
git checkout master
file foo.bar
# foo.bar: ASCII text
cd ..
4)
git clone git-bug-or-feature git-bug-or-feature_clone
cd git-bug-or-feature_clone
file foo.bar
--
philip
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