Enforce "\n" line endings on Windows

[haferburg]

With Windows line endings, which seems to be the default on Windows, the
zig compiler won't understand std out of the box. This project should
not rely on git's global core.autocrlf setting.

[haferburg]

Hi there, btw! :)

I've been following this project for a long time. Yesterday, I finally spent a couple hours building LLVM and Clang, and I got zig to compile out of the box. Awesome!

But I ran into trouble with hello.zig, because of line endings. First, zig wouldn't compile hello.zig. Fine. But then it wouldn't even compile std/bootstrap.zig or std/panic.zig. Because git automatically converts to Windows line endings on Windows. And I had the same problem when I tried to compile the tetris project.

My favorite solution would be for zig to work with all types of line endings. If you make a Windows executable that is run on Windows by Windows users, I don't see why they should be forced to use non-Windows line endings. Otherwise this is something that every zig project would need to do: Provide a .gitattributes file that makes sure that git won't convert to Windows line endings.

[andrewrk]

Cc @thejoshwolfe

[andrewrk]

One thing we can do is allow crlf but replace them with zig fmt (when it exists)

[andrewrk]

I'm conflicted about this because the autocrlf feature of git is a misfeature. Git is mangling binary files (how does it really know the difference between text and binary?) Git is also mangling text files. Even for projects other than Zig, the autocrlf feature is better left off. It only causes trouble.

[andrewrk]

https://stackoverflow.com/a/2825829/432

Unless you can see specific treatment which must deal with native EOL, you are better off leaving autocrlf to false.

[thejoshwolfe]

@haferburg do you know why autocrlf is enabled for you? usually it's disabled. did you turn it on? did it solve some problem for you?

[haferburg]

@thejoshwolfe According to this http://adaptivepatchwork.com/2012/03/01/mind-the-end-of-your-line/, core.eol = native is the default setting, which means CRLF on Windows.

[thejoshwolfe]

@haferburg yes. the defaults are core.eol = native, and core.autocrlf = false. The latter means that git is not going to convert/corrupt your files by default.

[thejoshwolfe]

looks like if a repo contains a .gitattributes file with * -text, then that disables autocrlf for the repo regardless of anyone's global configuration. i haven't experimented to see if that also disables text diffs though. there maybe be some incantation we can do to make this issue irrelevant for the zig repo.

[haferburg]

@thejoshwolfe Hi again! You asked why autocrlf was enabled, and I just found out. When installing the client from https://gitforwindows.org/, there is a wizard that recommends setting autocrlf to true, which is also the default setting in that wizard.