This was added long ago as part of the userdiff refactoring for textconv, as internally it made the code simpler and cleaner. However, there was never a concrete use case for actually using the config variable. Now that Matthieu Moy has provided such a use case, it's easy to explain it using his example. Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> --- On Sun, Jan 09, 2011 at 07:55:43PM +0100, Matthieu Moy wrote: > Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > > > you can get what you want with: > > > > echo '*.ps diff=ps' >.gitattributes > > git config diff.ps.textconv ps2ascii > > git config diff.ps.binary true > > Yes, this works great. Thanks. > > Did I miss something, or is this undocumented? I can't find that in > either man gitattributes or man git-config. Nope, it was never documented, probably because I never figured out what it was good for. :) Documentation/gitattributes.txt | 33 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 files changed, 33 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) diff --git a/Documentation/gitattributes.txt b/Documentation/gitattributes.txt index 22b8582..a282adb 100644 --- a/Documentation/gitattributes.txt +++ b/Documentation/gitattributes.txt @@ -591,6 +591,39 @@ and now produces better output), you can remove the cache manually with `git update-ref -d refs/notes/textconv/jpg` (where "jpg" is the name of the diff driver, as in the example above). +Marking files as binary +^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ + +Git usually guesses correctly whether a blob contains text or binary +data by examining the beginning of the contents. However, sometimes you +may want to override its decision, either because a blob contains binary +data later in the file, or because the content, while technically +composed of text characters, is opaque to a human reader. For example, +many postscript files contain only ascii characters, but produce noisy +and meaningless diffs. + +The simplest way to mark a file as binary is to unset the diff +attribute in the `.gitattributes` file: + +------------------------ +*.ps -diff +------------------------ + +This will cause git to generate `Binary files differ` (or a binary +patch, if binary patches are enabled) instead of a regular diff. + +However, one may also want to specify other diff driver attributes. For +example, you might want to use `textconv` to convert postscript files to +an ascii representation for human viewing, but otherwise treat them as +binary files. You cannot specify both `-diff` and `diff=ps` attributes. +The solution is to use the `diff.*.binary` config option: + +------------------------ +[diff "ps"] + textconv = ps2ascii + binary = true +------------------------ + Performing a three-way merge ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ -- 1.7.3.5.4.g0dc52 -- 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