Re: About git reporting missing newline for symlinks

["Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Oct 12 2022, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Ignacio Taranto <ignacio.taranto@eclypsium.com> writes:
>
>> 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?
>
> Yes, but not really.
>
> It is not "warning" at all.  The users want to know when compared
> contents do or do not end with an incomplete line at the end, and
> the "\ No newline" is the diff's way to give that single bit of
> information to us.
>
> And the contents of a symbolic link typically is a single incomplete
> line, so it is expected to see "\ No newline" when comparing them.
>
> This is important as "git diff | git -C ../some/where/else apply"
> should be able to recreate the change in the current repository
> (which may have change to or addition of a symbolic link) in the
> other repository, and "git apply" on the receiving end must be able
> to tell that the symbolic link it needs to create in the other
> repository must not have an extra LF at the end.

In apply.c's parse_fragment() we seem to only care that we find a
"\"-line that's at least the length of "\ No newline...".

I wonder what (if any) compatibility issues we'd have if we emitted
e.g.:

	\ The filename pointed to by the symlink does not end in a newline