Re: Force git diff to create a binary patch?

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

Jason Xu <jasonx98@gmail.com> writes:

>> The "--binary" option was invented as a way to tell Git to
>> produce something that can be applied, where Git stopped at
>> saying "binary files differ".
>
> Doesn't `--text` already do that? Albeit with whitespace warnings.

I do not think so.  --text is about forcing everything to be treated
text, so you'll not see binary patches but the patch-looking thing
with binary garbage you wrote in the message that started this
thread.  IOW, that is the opposite of what you want.  And I agree
that such a "diff -a" output is prone to corruption during transfer
(e.g. over e-mail) and a way to tell exactly which paths should be
shown as binary patches is a good thing to have.

> That's why I propose better binary file detection, instead of (what I
> understand to be) "make all patches in a patch file GIT binary
> patches, regardless if a file is text".

Oh, I agree that "treat everything as binary and produce binary
patch for all paths" is a nonsense option no sane person would want
to use.  The users are better off exchanging bundles at that point,
as such a binary-only patches are unreadable anyway.

There is no "better detection"; the only thing you could get is
"better heuristics" and there will always be a limit to what
heuristics can do for you.  

And that is why you were given gitattributes very early in the
discussion ;-)  That is the mechanism to tell exactly which paths
should be treated as binary.