Override .gitattributes text=auto in Windows

Question

This is pretty unintuitive:

C:\python-tdl\examples\termbox>git config core.autocrlf
false

C:\python-tdl\examples\termbox>git commit termbox.py
warning: LF will be replaced by CRLF in examples/termbox/termbox.py.
The file will have its original line endings in your working directory.
warning: LF will be replaced by CRLF in examples/termbox/termbox.py.
The file will have its original line endings in your working directory.
warning: LF will be replaced by CRLF in examples/termbox/termbox.py.
The file will have its original line endings in your working directory.
Aborting commit due to empty commit message.

According to various media with core.autocrlf=false there should be no linefeed conversion at all.

In project root I discovered .gitattributes with the line:

# Auto detect text files and perform LF normalization
* text=auto

If I comment it, the warning goes away. The question - how can I override this .gitattibutes setting automatically?

Stenosis

Answer 1

.gitattributes overrides all config settings, so it really can't be overridden; it is the "overrider," so to speak. While you can simply remove the line, this will cause inconsistent behavior on other developers' machines if they have core.autocrlf=true. So the best bet would be to add the following line to .gitattributes: * -text. This will disable CRLF processing for all files.

Bubalo

It would be nice if GIT has some option to turn EOL conversion off completely regardless of the .gitattributes file. In my case the .gitattributes file is maintained by RE and I can't change it but I absolutely want to have all files on my PC with just LF. – Rapallo

Thanks so much. I've spent ages battling with a fast-export that had * text=auto set. This did the trick. I'd up-vote 10 times if I could! – Camphor

@AndreiLED you can override this per repo, by editing/adding .git/info/attributes. The order of precedence is global config -> .gitattributes in the dir -> .git/info/attributes (i.e. the latter takes highest preference and overrides the others). Reference here: git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes – Camphor

Thanks, I will give it a try. Though, I already achieved the desired effect by setting core.eol to lf. – Rapallo

Answer 2

At least in modern versions of git, .git/info/attributes (or $GIT_DIR/info/attributes) overrides .gitattributes for local configuration.

Use * !text to use the value of core.autocrlf, or * -text to force no conversion.

See the documentation for gitattributes and the text attribute.

Also note: core.eol, the eol attribute

Aquamarine