Adding .gitattributes

[Michael1993]

To make JUnit Pioneer (and spotless) work more seamlessly, we should consider adding a .gitattributes file.
Specifically I am thinking about adding an option for line-endings (e.g.: * text eol=crlf).

[Bukama]

What are the consequences for OS that have another line ending / break?

[Michael1993]

I just tried on Windows 10, and spotless changed all line-endings to LF.
Which added every file in the project to the commit as "changed". 🤦
If we had .gitattributes this would not be an issue.

[Bukama]

I just tried on Windows 10, and spotless changed all line-endings to LF.
Which added every file in the project to the commit as "changed". 🤦
If we had .gitattributes this would not be an issue.

Hmm never had this issue, but I have configured my Git to checkout LF for system, but keep the original LF for commiting/check in

[Bukama]

I just tried on Windows 10, and spotless changed all line-endings to LF.
Which added every file in the project to the commit as "changed". 🤦
If we had .gitattributes this would not be an issue.

Hmm never had this issue, but I have configured my Git to checkout LF for system, but keep the original LF for commiting/check in

As the Git documentations says, that's because:

Note that setting core.autocrlf to true or input overrides core.eol

[dwalluck]

The spotless authors suggest the use of .gitattributes as a fix, and you can see it used in their own repository, https://github.com/diffplug/spotless/blob/main/.gitattributes, as well as JUnit's own repository, https://github.com/junit-team/junit5/blob/main/.gitattributes.

I looked at diffplug/spotless#22, but I could not figure out if there is a way to just configure the plugin itself to handle line endings.

In my repository, I have used * -text which makes Git treat each file as binary, which means keep existing newlines. This seems like a better default behavior, since if you have a .bat or .sh file, you probably never want to change the newlines. However, this setting did not work with spotless, only * text eol=lf. Spotless seems to required that eol be set, and I don't think there's an option to keep eol unmodified, which would be the best option.

Another issue unrelated to spotless is that when using GitHub CI on Windows, it automatically changes all files newlines on checkout, and I couldn't figure out how to configure this, see actions/checkout#135.

[dwalluck]

To make a long story short, if you're already on Linux or macOS, then you shouldn't notice any change with this. But, if you're on Windows, then this will fix the build for you and stop changing the newlines on all the source files (which for me are not the files that are checked out, but the ones that end up in the build tree).

Since even people on Windows don't want this Git "feature", I wonder if anyone does. The only thing to look out for is that if you ever need a Windows-specific file, you should add the file (or file extension) to the .gitattribues file. But, I don't see any such files in junit-pioneer.

[nipafx]

Thanks @Michael1993 and @dwalluck for bringing this up. See #347 for my proposed solution.