| [platform-dev] CRLF Problems |
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Guys, The platform's Git repositories are rife with text files that
have been committed with CRLF rather than LF. These things
generally lead to totally confusing problems in EGit where files
are shown as dirty with no apparent actual differences. This is
of course a barrier to entry for our contributors. Worse still,
the problems are really quite hard to fix. Previous attempts to
fix such things indicate that it's all to easy to "fix" them
incorrectly, e.g., https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/148635/ In this case there were files that had a mixture of CRLF and LF.
The naive attempt to fix this using EGit (convert the whole file
to LF endings) ended up with a Gerrit commit that in actual fact
converted them all to CRLF rather than converting them all to LF
as intended. I needed to change the repository's autocrlf to
false in order to correctly commit a fix with actual LF endings.
Julian Honnen was super helpful and responsive processing this
contributions. Thanks Julian!! In any case, to fix these problems more easily, I've implemented a utility that I can use (or anyone can use) to automate the process. It uses JGit under the covers. It copies the existing clone (to avoid re-cloning the entire repo and to avoid dirtying the existing clone), changes the copy's autocrlf to false, deletes the copy's working tree, and then does a reset hard to create a fresh new working tree that should (and generally does) contain text files with only LF in them. All the files in the working tree are then processed to convert any remaining CRLF to LF, i.e., to fix any files improperly commited to Git in the past. From this copy one can easily commit to Gerrit a fix to correct all improper files. I used that tool for the following Gerrit commit: https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/150035/ I would like to fix all the platform's repositories, but I would
not like to spend the next weeks waiting for reviews, re-basing
multiple times, and hoping to eventually get the commit through.
I really do actually have better things to do with my time. :-P I have commit rights for the Platform and Equinox (thanks Lars for starting an election for that) so I can do that on my own without bothering other people. E.g., I could fix a feature's "null" provider: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=550648 But I do not have commit rights for PDE and JDT. The PDE folks are very responsive, so that's not a problem, but JDT seems to be a dead zone of silence. Sorry for that. I don't intend to criticize anyone personally and of course I know that everyone else also has more important things to do with their time than deal with trivial deltas. Nevertheless, I need to understand how to get someone's attention to move forward in this process: What do I need to do so that some JDT committer looks a 150035? If trivial things can't move forward, it doesn't bode well for
moving forward on more complex contributions to JDT... Regards, |