What's the eof attribute?

[Eliah Kagan (EliahKagan)]

One of the .gitattributes files in the gitoxide repo unsets the eof attribute on some files containing test data:

gitoxide/gix-config/tests/fixtures/fuzzed/.gitattributes

Line 1 in b06f729

*.config -text -eof

I have not been able to find any documentation on the eof attribute. I don't think Git itself recognizes or uses it, but maybe some other tool does.

Does this prevent some tool from automatically adding/removing line endings at the very end of files? I don't think Git ever adds them automatically (it will convert between LF and CRLF if so configured, but not, as far as I know, change the number of line endings). Other tools that use a repository's Git attributes can recognize their own, but it would be very strange if any tool automatically normalized line endings in files for which text has been unset, as is also done there. So I'm not sure what -eof would do, even hypothetically.

The file was created with those contents in 6bb407f, along with the other contents of the fixtures/fuzzed directory. Examining the context there doesn't seem to reveal the effect or intent of -eof.

[Sebastian Thiel (Byron)]

I am sorry for that. No mention of this ominous attribute probably means that it's a mistake. It was probably meant to be eol, which does exist but still would be superfluous here and/or is used incorrectly.

[Eliah Kagan (EliahKagan)]

Thanks. I plan to open a PR in a few minutes to fix an error in .gitattributes I inadvertently introduced in c957ab8 (#1340), where the actual files inside gix-packetline-blocking/src still had linguist-vendored unspecified, and also simplifies .gitattributes files throughout the project. I'll include the removal of this -eof in that PR as well.

Edit: I've opened #1690, which includes this.