Steffen Prohaska said the following on 13.08.2007 09:32:
On Aug 13, 2007, at 9:15 AM, Marius Storm-Olsen wrote:Steffen Prohaska said the following on 13.08.2007 08:50:We should really make autocrlf = true the default for us and fix all problems that we'll encounter. There may be more tricky stuff ahead, like merges, cherry-picks, ...I'm more leaning towards having the installer give you the option to choose what kind of line-endings you want Git to work with; just like the Cygwin installer.Which is the root of much trouble with Cygwin. People now say, git works perfectly in Cygwin but forget to mention that they mean Cygwin A (in binmode) but not Cygwin B (in textmode). Better choose the right default and work hard to make the default choice work perfectly. I am strongly against an option in the installer. An option _will_ cause confusion. Better give people a hint how they can override the default for a single user, or for a single repo. Then they recognize that they move to a non-default configuration and hopefully think twice. And we never need to talk about msysgit A vs. msysgit B, but only about msysgit with repo specific or user specific options.For me, the question comes down to the following: What would the average Windows user (real Windows user, not Linux user who was forced to work in Cygwin!) expect git to do with line endings? Theanswer to this question should be the default.
If we were talking about a huge amount (real) Windows users I would agree with you. However, currently most of the users using Git on Windows are Unix users which for some reason have to work on Windows every now and then. And changing the default option to autocrlf=true would be stepping on their toes, which we probably don't want to do :-)
I'm a Windows developer myself, so I naturally have autocrlf=true in my global settings. I don't think having the option in the installer (together with other things, like setting the global username, and email for example) would be such a bad thing. The problem with the way the Cygwin installer presents it is that it doesn't explain the pros and cons of the two options; it just recommends Linux EOL, which leads to confusion with some Windows developers. If we properly explain the issue in the installer, and say we recommend Windows EOL for Windows developers, I think it's OK. It would in any case be better than the current state where you have no option, or stepping on all the current msysgit/mingw-git maintainers toes.
-- .marius
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
