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

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Tue, 13 Feb 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> I'd much rather just get this right, and that means "no hooks". If people 
> start using commit hooks etc, that will just mean that they won't use them 
> for all-windows environments (why use it? Everybody hass CRLF, and 
> everybody _wants_ CRLF), or it will just be relatively expensive to have a 
> complex hook anyway.
> 
> So I think we should plan on something like .gitattributes or similar, so 
> that we _can_ handle mixed environments well, without any real setup or 
> any real costs.

Here's a patch that I think we can merge right now. There may be other 
places that need this, but this at least points out the three places that 
read/write working tree files for git update-index, checkout and diff 
respectively. That should cover a lot of it.

Some day we can actually implement it. In the meantime, this points out a 
place for people to start. We *can* even start with a really simple "we do 
CRLF conversion automatically, regardless of filename" kind of approach, 
that just look at the data (all three cases have the _full_ file data 
already in memory) and says "ok, this is text, so let's convert to/from 
DOS format directly".

THAT somebody can write in ten minutes, and it would already make git much 
nicer on a DOS/Windows platform, I suspect.

And it would be totally zero-cost if you just make it a config option 
(but please make it dynamic with the _default_ just being 0/1 depending 
on whether it's UNIX/Windows, just so that UNIX people can _test_ it 
easily).

		Linus