Git 1.6.4 beta on Windows (msysgit) - Unix or DOS line termination

Question

I am installing msysgit 1.6.4 beta on my Win Vista development VPC. An install screen is requesting whether I want to use Unix line termination or DOS line termination. Ordinarily, I'd choose DOS, but the setup text indicates that DOS termination may mean files do not work with all of Git's command line tools. The Unix line termination states "...most [Windows] applications can handle this...".

Does anyone know which option I should choose to use Git via the shell for my VS 2008 work?

Answer 1

That settings during the install process of msysgit is actually here to fix the value of the core.autocrlf config.

core.autocrlf

If true, makes git convert CRLF at the end of lines in text files to LF when reading from the filesystem, and convert in reverse when writing to the filesystem.

The variable can be set to 'input', in which case the conversion happens only while reading from the filesystem but files are written out with LF at the end of lines.

Currently, which paths to consider "text" (i.e. be subjected to the autocrlf mechanism) is decided purely based on the contents.

I would insist on not trying to convert anything automagically, the side-effects are just too important (in term of potential merging conflict, especially on distributed development with different environments)

If your tools can handle Unix-style line termination, you should set them to produce Unix lines, which can then be read by Windows (VS2008, Notepad++, ...) and Unix alike, and can be processed by any 'sh' Git-scripts.

But with core.autocrlf set to false, the decision to transform a text line termination will be a voluntary explicit one, not a background invisible side-effect one.

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See more at "How line ending conversions work with git core.autocrlf between different operating systems"

                 | Resulting conversion when       | Resulting conversion when 
                 | committing files with various   | checking out FROM repo - 
                 | EOLs INTO repo and              | with mixed files in it and
                 |  core.autocrlf value:           | core.autocrlf value:           
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
File             | true       | input      | false | true       | input | false
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Windows-CRLF     | CRLF -> LF | CRLF -> LF | as-is | as-is      | as-is | as-is
Unix -LF         | as-is      | as-is      | as-is | LF -> CRLF | as-is | as-is
Mac  -CR         | as-is      | as-is      | as-is | as-is      | as-is | as-is
Mixed-CRLF+LF    | as-is      | as-is      | as-is | as-is      | as-is | as-is
Mixed-CRLF+LF+CR | as-is      | as-is      | as-is | as-is      | as-is | as-is

Answer 2

Visual Studio 2008 handles Unix line terminations without problems. However, it will try to detect text files with inconsistent line terminations in an attempt to fix these. Notepad on the other hand is not able to properly display Unix text files.