When illustrating how to normalize the line endings, the
documentation in gitattributes tells the user to `rm .git/index`.
This is incorrect for two reasons:
- Users shouldn't be instructed to mess around with the internal
implementation of Git using raw file system tools like `rm`.
- Within a submodule or an additional working tree `.git` is just a
file containing a `gitdir: <path>` pointer into the real `.git`
directory. Therefore `rm .git/index` does not work.
The purpose of the `rm .git/index` instruction is to remove all entries
from the index without touching the working tree. The way to do this
with Git is to use `read-tree --empty`.
Signed-off-by: Andreas Heiduk <asheiduk@gmail.com>
Helped-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Helped-by: Torsten Bögershausen <tboegi@web.de>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
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$ echo "* text=auto" >.gitattributes
-$ rm .git/index # Remove the index to re-scan the working directory
+$ git read-tree --empty # Clean index, force re-scan of working directory
$ git add .
$ git status # Show files that will be normalized
$ git commit -m "Introduce end-of-line normalization"