I Am Now an Official Git Contributor
Published:
The patch I sent to the GitGitGadget doorstep ten days ago has been merged into master.
Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01
Junio C Hamano, the Git maintainer, merged the branch kw/gitattributes-typofix into master. The commit carries my name as author.
https://github.com/git/git/commit/0bf506efd40251ebdc9ed829d8bb90d879d2c7aa
Author: Koutian Wu <ktwu01@gmail.com>
Committer: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Subject: gitattributes: fix eol attribute for Perl scripts
The merge itself:
https://github.com/git/git/commit/8cf57cbec4de63ad41e8b3c705505771784abf50
The fix was one line. The .gitattributes file had *.pl text eof=lf diff=perl, where eof should have been eol. Git’s line-ending attribute is eol=lf, not eof=lf, so the rule never actually normalized line endings for Perl scripts. I changed it to match the neighboring *.perl and *.pm rules, signed it off under my own name, and sent it through GitGitGadget to the mailing list.
I did not stumble onto this typo by browsing Git’s source for fun. I found it because of a real CRLF/LF problem on this very blog’s own repository, which I originally set up and maintained on a Mac. Once I started operating on it from a Windows machine, git status kept showing a pile of files as modified even though nobody had touched their contents, purely because of line-ending normalization differences between the two OSes. I did not just live with it. I added a .gitattributes file to this repo to force consistent LF endings, and writing those rules by hand is what taught me the correct syntax, eol=lf, not eof=lf. That is what let me spot the identical typo sitting in Git’s own .gitattributes a day later.
That patch is now part of the history that every git clone of the canonical repository carries forward.
It was a one-line fix. It still counts.
Related posts:
- Sending My First Git Patch to the GitGitGadget Doorstep, the original submission story.
- What It Actually Takes to Land a Patch in Git, the full retrospective on the GitGitGadget process.
- 中文版：我现在是正式的 Git Contributor 了