Re: About git reporting missing newline for symlinks

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

"brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:

> On 2022-10-12 at 21:17:04, Ignacio Taranto wrote:
>> So, both git diff and git show display "\ No newline at end of file"
>> for symlinks.
>> 
>> I think this is related to how Git renders diffs, IMO it shouldn't
>> display a warning about
>> newlines for symlinks.
>> 
>> Am I making any sense here?
>
> What Git shows for a symlink is the destination of the symlink.  On
> Unix systems other than macOS, path names may contain any byte other
> than NUL, including a newline.
>
> While it obviously is not a good practice to include newlines in your
> paths, it is possible, and Git would not be able to round-trip symlinks
> where the final character of the destination is a newline if we didn't
> handle trailing newlines properly.  As a result, we're not likely to
> change things here because it's required for correctness.

Just a fun thought experiment, but I wonder what would happen if a
user chooses to add .clean and .smudge filter that adds and strips
a LF at the end ;-)