CODEWITHSUNDEEP
git
u123
u123

Reputation: 16321

gitattributes and the binary option

In the gitattributes you can specify that a specific file type should be treated as binary, e.g.

*.myExt binary

From:

http://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes

This means that no line ending conversion will be applied or that textual diffs will be produced.

But what happens if I need to merge the content anyway? Will git try to merge it or simply skip all file types listed as binary in the gitattributes file?

Its not clear from: http://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes

if file types marked as binary will be merged (meaning that git will try to do a merge/report possible conflict or simply skip this type off file).

Upvotes: 2

Views: 4187

Answers (1)

Edward Thomson
Edward Thomson

Reputation: 78743

If you mark a file as binary, then it is not automergeable. If two branches both change the file then git will refuse to perform the merge and will simply mark the file as a conflict:

% cat .gitattributes
foo.txt binary

% git merge branch
warning: Cannot merge binary files: foo.txt (HEAD vs. branch)
Auto-merging foo.txt
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in foo.txt
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.

However, if you want to allow the files to be automergeable but still keep the other effects of the binary attribute - namely, removing CR/LF conversion from the implied -text attribute, and removing diff'ability from the implied -diff attribute, then you can set the merge attribute:

% echo 'foo.txt binary merge' > .gitattributes

% cat .gitattributes
foo.txt binary merge

% git merge branch
Auto-merging foo.txt
Merge made by the 'recursive' strategy.
 foo.txt | Bin 112 -> 112 bytes
 1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

Upvotes: 5

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