history - Line endings messed up in Git - how to track changes from another branch after a huge line ending fix?

Question

We are working with a 3rd party PHP engine that gets regular updates. The releases are kept on a separate branch in git, and our fork is the master branch.

This way we'll be able to apply patches to our fork from the new releases of the engine.

My problem is, after many commits to our branch, I realized that the initial import of the engine was done with CRLF line endings.

I converted every file to LF, but this made a huge commit, with 100k lines removed and 100k lines added, which obviously breaks what we intended to do: easily merge in patches from the factory releases of that 3rd party engine.

What whould I do know? How can I fix this? I already have hundreds of commits on our fork.

What would be good is to somehow do a line endings fix commit after the initial import and before branching our own fork, and removing that huge line ending commit later in history.

However I have no idea how to do this in Git.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I finally managed to solve it.

The answer is:

git filter-branch --tree-filter '~/Scripts/fix-line-endings.sh' -- --all

fix-line-endings.sh contains:

#!/bin/sh
find . -type f -a ( -name '*.tpl' -o -name '*.php' -o -name '*.js' -o -name '*.css' -o -name '*.sh' -o -name '*.txt' -iname '*.html' ) | xargs fromdos

After all line endings were fixed in all trees in all commits, I did an interactive rebase and removed all commits that were fixing line endings.

Now my repo is clean and fresh, ready to be pushed :)

Note to visitors: do not do this if your repo has been pushed / cloned because it will mess things up badly!