Git blame showing no history

Question

When I run git blame on a file (using msysgit) I always get the following sort of printout:

00000000 (Not Committed Yet 2011-01-09 11:21:30 +0200   1) package co 00000000 (Not Committed Yet 2011-01-09 11:21:30 +0200   2) { 00000000 (Not Committed Yet 2011-01-09 11:21:30 +0200   3)      impor 00000000 (Not Committed Yet 2011-01-09 11:21:30 +0200   4)      impor 00000000 (Not Committed Yet 2011-01-09 11:21:30 +0200   5)      impor 00000000 (Not Committed Yet 2011-01-09 11:21:30 +0200   6)      impor 00000000 (Not Committed Yet 2011-01-09 11:21:30 +0200   7)      impor 

i.e. it shows all lines as Not Yet Committed.

I tried this on many files, that have many commits - always the same results. I also tried using relative/full path, but it seems to make no difference.

When I try to use TortoiseGit's blame it always shows every line as being last committed at the first commit:

even thought, as I've said, there are actually tens of commits in the history of these files..

Ideas?

Edit - More Info

• Git blame works fine on GitHub, where this repo is hosted.
• It also works fine if I clone it to a linux machine and do the blame there
• It seems that only on msysgit this doesn't work

Answer 1

git blame file.txt blames the version of file.txt in your working copy. If file.txt has Windows-newlines (CRLF) in the repo and you have core.autocrlf = true, then every line of file.txt will be considered different and will be reported by git blame as not yet committed.

The reason why git blame <my_branch> (or even better git blame HEAD, which works no matter what branch you're on) works, is that it doesn't blame the working copy version so there's no potential for lines not yet being committed.