I approached the Cygwin mailing list about this problem, and the package maintainer suggested I ask here as well, in case someone can shed some light on this. I am using git-1.6.4.2 (as part of Cygwin-1.7 beta) and I've observed some behaviour that seems wrong to me. When we deployed git on Cygwin, we decided to set core.autocrlf=true, as many of our users are working with DOS/Windows files (CRLF endings). Some users are using Linux and working on the same code. I'm not actually sure why we chose to use this setting - there's a lot of conflicting advice around. I think the final decision was made so that kdiff3 would operate correctly. However we did go to lengths to ensure that everyone is using the same configuration setting. The problem is that sometimes, after a git-clone, the output of git-status and git-diff shows entire files as being different. However these files have not been modified by the user - only git has had a chance to change them (due to autocrlf=true). But surely if git has converted the file automatically, it should know that it has to compensate for this when comparing with the local repository? And I think it usually does this and almost all files behave properly. The problem arises when the source-controlled file contains lines with trailing whitespace. In this situation, git-diff clearly indicates a difference and this blocks merges and checkouts. I suspect what is happening is that the line conversion routine in git might be stripping trailing whitespace, as well as converting the line endings. This operation is not properly accounted for in the reverse direction, and the file is flagged as modified. The Cygwin git package maintainer has indicated that he thinks this might be a bug: http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2009-12/msg00466.html Also, as cloned files are converted to DOS-line-endings, by default Cygwin's bash cannot run any scripts as they have the wrong line endings. I have to set the 'permanent' bash variable SHELLOPTS to include 'igncr' before bash scripts can run. Perhaps this is wrong and git on Cygwin (with binary mounts) should be converting to UNIX line endings instead? At one point I tried switching off core.autocrlf for myself but this caused a lot of conflicts due to mismatched line-endings. It seems to me that if we want to switch to this, *everyone* has to do it at once. I'd like to know whether this is a problem worthy of further investigation, whether it should fall in the git or Cygwin camp, and whether I really ought to be using autocrlf=true please. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html