Re: problem with BOINC repository and CR/LF

[Dmitry Potapov <dpotapov@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 4:31 PM, Toralf Förster <toralf.foerster@gmx.de> wrote:
>
> /me still wonders whether this race condition is a feature or an issue
> in GIT - b/c it means that 2 different people cloning the same
> repository get different results.

The problem is that Git assumes that conversion from git to the worktree
and back produces the same result. Unfortunately, this assumption is not
enforced anywhere and when it is broken by editing .gitattributes, it may
be difficult to notice that immediately unless you do that trick with
removing the index and "git reset". Perhaps, it would be better if
git considered that timestamps on all files changed if .gitattributes
is changed, so it would check all files for consistence, then anyone
who edits .gitattributes will be forced to fix the file ending to be
consistent.

Anyway, when this underlying assumption is broken, it is easy to get
that race, because git checks only those files for modification that
have its timestamp equal or newer than the index. (The equal timestamp
are inspected for modification, because the timestamp resolution can
be 1 second on some systems.) When you check out some version, some
of files are going to have an older timestamp than the index (and thus
they are not inspected for modification) but those that have the same
timestamp as the index are inspected for modification.


Dmitry