git line endings - can't stash, reset and now can't rebase over spurious line endings commit

Question

I have a repo I added a gitattributes to it and was working on it fine. I sync it via dropbox to another machine. When I opened it to the other machine a bunch

Answer 1

We ran into this issue today where it seemed the problem stemmed from some CRLF-related issues related to a newly added .gitattributes file with a single line * text=auto. When you rebased or created a new branch, said file would follow you and ruin any changes that came after along with preventing you from leaving that branch without first committing it.

We initially fixed this by checking out a temporary branch, reverting the file back to a sane state (before modifications), committing and then doing a rebase on the entire branch back to the oldest commit to make it look like master. That worked for a while but a similar file popped up after that and the same fix didn't work again.

What we eventually went with was similar to what op shared in his update.. a single line inside .git/info/attributes with file-to-remove -text seems to mitigate the problem. I say mitigate because I'm not sure if there are any adverse implications to doing this, this was also for one file so might not work as well if at all.