Line endings with cygwin and Github for Windows

Question

I'm want to be able to work on my git projects using both the Github for Windows application as well as git in the command line using Cygwin (on Windows).

But I keep on getting problems with the line endings when I switch from one to the other.

If with the command line tool the repo has no changes, it will want to modify all the files with the Github app. If I do the changes with the Github app it will then again want to change it with the command line tool.

After a fair amount of testing I couldn't make it work for both tools.

What would make it work? In the .gitatributes I currently have set: * text=auto But it doesn't help

Answer 1

This is a GHfW bug which occurs when your repository configuration and the data in your repository do not agree.

If you configure a file to be translated to CRLF line endings - by setting core.autocrlf to true, for example, but you have blobs in your repository that are already in CRLF format (likely because somebody hasn't set core.autocrlf to true) then this problem can occur.

In this case, GHfW translates the CRLFs in the repository differently than msysgit. As a result, some or all files appeared dirty.

I would recommend a consistent approach to your CRLF across your team to avoid any ambiguity by git tools as to what they should do with your line endings. That said, this bug was recently fixed in libgit2, the library that underlies GHfW, and should makes its way into GHfW soon.

Answer 2

Working on both Git Bash and Cygwin in Windows is going to make git confuse. That is:

• clone/checkout a repo under Git Bash. During checking out, git thinks it's on Windows, so usually it uses CRLF to check out text files.
• run git in Cygwin, git thinks it's on Linux and that repo had been checked out in Linux(which is actually not, according to the previous step). Therefore, when git sees CRLF in Cygwin, it thinks that LF is modified into CRLF so that git reports a lots files changes.

One way to fix this is to create .gitattributes file in repo's root and add lines like the following:

*.txt text eol=lf

It tell git when encounter file with suffix .txt, using LF both when writing into "database(.git)" and checking out into working directory.

reference here

Answer 3

I cloned a repository (with files with CRLF) on my windows using GitHub 2.7.0.24. Then I wanted to use my cygwin's git version 2.1.4 on it.

I edited .git/config by adding "autocrlf=true" under the [core] section. (With a real tabulation before "autocrlf=true")

Now cygwin's git says I'm up to date with no modifications.

I keep the CRLF on the files because they were created that way on the original repository.

I will not use the GitHub application anymore...

I noticed the merge conflicts are adding <<<< ==== >>>> lines with no CR, but they will be deleted when I resolve the conflicts.