As one can glean from other posts, Git's end-of-line normalization has its pros and cons. I have one particular Windows-only project where I think the best thing to do is to is to disable end-of-line normalization altogether. That is, I want to leave all newlines (most of which are CRLF
) intact, rather than have git normalize them to LF
-only behind the scenes, and I want that change to affect all clones of the repository on all machines. The question is the most effective way to do it.
Most discussions of Git end-of-line normalization are in terms of core.autocrlf
, and I could accomplish my goal by setting core.autocrlf=false
. However, this is a git-config setting, and I believe one has to set that separately on each machine by machine. If true, that seems error prone, especially since the msysgit
installer guides one into setting core.autocrlf=true
.
The best way to avoid having to set core.autocrlf
separately on each machine seems to be checking a .gitattributes
file into the repository containing the single line
* -text
Or, if you have an older version of Git then
* -crlf
This tells Git that, for all paths (thus the *
), end-of-line normalization should not be attempted. As far as I can tell, this should not have any other side-effects. In particular, it should not alter how diffs are generated (this has separate attribute diff
/-diff
) or how merges are handled (this has a separate attribute merge
/-merge
).
For more details, I suggest these resources:
- The gitattributes documentation (
git help attributes
or an online copy) , which describes in detail both how end-of-line normalization works and the particular effects of different attributes. (Probably most relevant are text
, crlf
, diff
, merge
, and binary
.)
- Git mailing list thread Is the "text" attribute meant only to specify end-of-line normalization behavior, or does it have broader implications? (Mar 30, 2012), which expands on the meaning of different attributes, and clarifies that
-text
does not mean simply "this is a binary file".