SourceTree App says uncommitted changes even for newly-cloned repository - what could be wrong?

Question

A remote git repository is just cloned to a local box using Atlassian SourceTree. Even no files have really been modified in the work tree, Atlassian lists a bunch of files right away under "Uncommitted changes". Each file shows same line count both as removed and added, and this count equals to the total count of lines in the file. This would somehow give a hint that we're hitting some kind of line ending problem.

However, the repository's .gitattribute contains

# Set default behaviour, in case users don't have core.autocrlf set.
* text=auto

that per GitHub article Dealing with Line Endings should make explicitly core.autocrlf true for the repository. However also ~/.gitconfig contains autocrlf = true.

If the modified files are tried to be "reverted" back to previous commit, there is no effect. Same files are still seen as uncommitted.

The repository has been cloned into multiple locations and ensured that no files have been in the same path, to make sure that SourceTree or git do not remember old files.

The repository is collaborated with Windows, Linux and OSX boxes. This problem appears only in OSX.

What could still be wrong in the SourceTree/repository/git setup?

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Update #1, 20. Apr 2013

As there is still something wrong, here are partial outputs of git config --list.

From SourceTree console (OSX)

core.excludesfile=/Users/User/.gitignore_global
core.autocrlf=input
difftool.sourcetree.cmd=opendiff "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"
difftool.sourcetree.path=
mergetool.sourcetree.cmd=/Applications/SourceTree.app/Contents/Resources/opendiff-w.sh "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE" -ancestor "$BASE" -merge "$MERGED"
mergetool.sourcetree.trustexitcode=true
core.repositoryformatversion=0
core.filemode=true
core.bare=false
core.logallrefupdates=true
core.ignorecase=true
core.autocrlf=true

Here is corresponding output from Windows side:

core.symlinks=false
core.autocrlf=false
color.diff=auto
color.status=auto
color.branch=auto
color.interactive=true
pack.packsizelimit=2g
help.format=html
http.sslcainfo=/bin/curl-ca-bundle.crt
sendemail.smtpserver=/bin/msmtp.exe
diff.astextplain.textconv=astextplain
rebase.autosquash=true
http.proxy=
core.autocrlf=true
core.repositoryformatversion=0
core.filemode=false
core.bare=false
core.logallrefupdates=true
core.symlinks=false
core.ignorecase=true
core.hidedotfiles=dotGitOnly
core.eol=native
core.autocrlf=true

And full .gitattributes for the repository in question

# Set default behaviour, in case users don't have core.autocrlf set.
* text=auto

*.php    text
*.twig   text
*.js     text
*.html   text diff=html
*.css    text
*.xml    text
*.txt    text
*.sh     text eol=lf
console  text

*.png    binary
*.jpg    binary
*.gif    binary
*.ico    binary
*.xslx   binary

Answer 1

I'm one of the SourceTree developers (I develop the Mac version of the product, actually), so hopefully I can be of some help.

Windows machines convert CRLF to LF when committing and LF to CRLF when checking out. autocrlf makes sure everything is LF within the repository. The option text = auto is the one we're interested in though as it says in the docs:

When text is set to "auto", the path is marked for automatic end-of-line normalization. If git decides that the content is text, its line endings are normalized to LF on checkin.

So you see on checkin it will say "Hey, I need to normalise these line-endings because they're not in LF format, but in CRLF." and thus modifies your working copy to do the work it's expected to do. Usually on Mac/Linux you wouldn't need to normalise because everything is in LF, but Git will do a check because you might've checked out from a repository that was previously developed on Windows, or perhaps in an editor that was using CRLF instead of LF.

So in short, you'd probably want to re-commit all of those files as they should be in LF format, but also make sure autocrlf = true (edit, always to true!) in your Windows repository as it says in the docs:

If you simply want to have CRLF line endings in your working directory regardless of the repository you are working with, you can set the config variable "core.autocrlf" without changing any attributes.

Although imagine that previous quote was when setting autocrlf for a specific repository as well as globally.

Hopefully that's of some help, if not, feel free to ask more questions!

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Here's a good SO post re: line endings: Why should I use core.autocrlf=true in Git?

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EDIT

Based on the above answer we need to make sure of a few things here.

• That you've set the relevant git options in your .git/config
• If you want to keep CRLF line endings then set autocrlf=true
• If, when checking out your repository, you don't want your line endings to be automatically converted (causing all your files to be in the "modified" state immediately) then set the text option to unset. Add this option if a global git config has it set to a value you don't want.
• If you're working on both Windows and Mac for a project then it's best you have text=auto and make sure LF is used across the board. This is why problems like this creep in; because your git config's differ or because the initial project/git setup on Windows assumes CRLF when your Mac assumes LF.

Answer 2

I still don't understand it 100%, but for us the issue was the * text=auto in the .gitattribute file in the repository. I checked, and we for sure have core.autocrlf=true set in every place it can be set for my user on a Windows PC. I knew it wasn't a SourceTree issue either, as TortoiseGit and just Windows Git (msysgit) all had the same "issue" for this repository. Really odd behavior - I would clone the repo one time and immediately see 11 "different" files, then I would delete and start over and the next clone would have 14 "different" files.

Commenting out the * text=auto in the .gitattribute file of the repository fixed everything. Its almost like text=auto does not behave the same as autocrlf=true and the latter is disabled if the first is set in the .gitattribute file. But that is not what every guide online seems to indicate.