Please Add .gitattributes To Your Git Repository

Not backwards compatible, will never ever happen

Maybe it’s time for windows to stop using CRLF and join the modern world?

Why do you think there is a problem and that's a solution?

Thanks. I somehow straight-up ignored gitattributes and can't recall to have seen them in projects. Glad that's past tense now and I will add presets from your link where appropriate (If I remember it). Never had conflicts with windows users on linux based repos but I suspect thats VSCodes merit in keeping the files as-is.

The two commands in your post are not mentioned in the linked repo-readme but instead in the github docs (see [1]).

I know git reset only from dealing with a detached HEAD. I did not understand the situation as well as the git reset command. Both is explained very good in [2].

So here's the gist of my research (possibly wrong).

Before you even add the .gitattributes file you should add all unstaged changes, commit & push them. To quickly revert back when things go wrong: zip the whole project.

git rm --cached -r: Normally git rm would remove a file from the filesystem in addition to the repo but the --cached says to only remove/untrack the file from the repo (what's inside the .git dir). Recursively removes every file. Cleans the current staging area too. So at this point you'd have to do git add again for every file but you wouldn't have lost any uncommitted changes in the working dir.

Now for the dangerous part:

git reset --hard This resets the HEAD to the most recent commit (and cleans the staging-area/index which was already done in the in git rm) and in addition possibly overwrites many unstaged/uncommitted changes with the files contents from the last commit.

So to end this novel. If you havent commited everything before executing the commands your in for a bad time. As far as I see it.

[1].

[2]

Where JavaScript?

So we should use this to make life easier for Windows users, mainly? Hmm.

I think this might be helpful for teams who use an heterogeneous set of platforms to checkout and work on their code. Windows is one of them, although in this day and age it's also possible to configure IDEs to do the right thing.

Another important usecase for .gitattributes is to force some file types to be handled as binary data types instead of text, and thus support different types of diff mechanisms. Case in point, a while back there was a discussion on how to track sqlite databases in a git repository in a way that a) the database file wasn't mangled, b) git diff actually outputted changes to the database instead of random noise. This stuff is handled at the .gitattributes level.

Think about it this way: by making their lives easier, you make life easier for yourself, too. It doesn't take a lot of effort to put a proper .gitattributes file in your repo, but in return, you'll nip any potential future issues from Windows users who are trying to contribute accidentally or unknowingly checking in files with the wrong line endings.

Inb4 "I don't care about contributions from Windows users anyways": a lot of apps are multiplatform these days (usually Electron). It's unreasonable to expect people to do all their coding in Linux and only use Windows for testing, especially when all the tooling already exists on Windows. VS Code will handle a repo with LF line endings just fine as long as you told git not to convert the line endings when checking out.

Mac OS is also a big tech OS and arguably doesn't respect the user.

Linux is nice but often not an option for devs for circumstantial reasons, such as needing to use a corporate-provided machine for work.

no. I’m sick of cicd pollution in my project dir.

This is about configuring the version control system you use to track your software. It has absolutely no relation with CICD systems.

All that shit needs to go under hidden folders.

On unix-like platforms, dot files are interpreted as hidden files. By design, .gitattributes is already hidden.