[llvm-dev] Git autocrlf for Windows - why does the Getting Started guide say to use false?

[James Henderson via llvm-dev]

I use almost exclusively 4 text editors (for some meaning of "editor") in
my usual workflow: Sublime Text (for tests), and Visual Studio 2017 (for
basically everything else). The third one is Beyond Compare which I use for
diffs, and often make minor edits in there prior to commit. Finally, I use
the p4merge tool for resolving merge conflicts. On further investigation,
it looks like the last of these is the culprit for messing up my line
endings (when I save the merge resolution, it saves with Windows line
endings), but it has an explicit setting I can change to use LF only
endings, so I have fixed this. Hopefully this should prevent me messing up
existing files from now on. It doesn't solve the new file issue though, nor
does it solve the issue for new people to the project, since it is an
obvious counter example to the "all reasonable text editors do the right
thing" comment.

I do use dos2unix, but only for generating new patches for uploading to
Phabricator. I did experiment with it once when I thought something looked
fishy with the line endings in the code I was looking at, but it seemed to
touch my whole file. Probably it was in a bad state already though, and I
just hadn't realised.

I do think fixing .gitattributes sounds like the best solution, and I
certainly would prefer input be the specified preference (I might well
change my settings to do that, to solve things for my own workflow), as
this solves the new file issue. I note also that git warns if your line
endings would be changed automatically when you add a file. I'd propose a
note to add to the documentation as a possible compromise, or possibly a
pair of options, listing the caveats of each, but I can't think of a
concise coherent way of saying it. Suggestions welcome!

On Thu, 16 Jan 2020 at 18:38, Reid Kleckner <rnk at google.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 9:36 AM Robinson, Paul via llvm-dev <
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
>> I’m inclined to think the llvm.org docs should say to use “input” on
>> Windows, we’ve been happy with that in the Sony repo as James mentioned.
>>
>> But I’d also like to hear from a Windows user from outside Sony first.
>>
>
> I also think we should recommend `input`, if it does what I think it does:
> convert from CRLF to LF, and never back.
>
> This can break a few cases:
> - adding binary files for a test that you forgot to mark binary
> - adding CRLF text files for a test that you forgot to mark binary
>
> These seem like more common exceptions than adding a new source file,
> which are often mistakenly committed with CRLF. Any screwups, reverts, and
> bot breakages from that seem less costly than accidentally adding line
> ending changes, which live forever as a tax on `git annotate`.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20200117/24c584d1/attachment.html>