How are you enforcing git behavior, including locally (particularly on Windows)?

I'm taking point on moving this .NET shop from svn to git, and have identified some ancillary issues I'd like to have a solution for before we flip the switch.

The one I'm asking about in particular in this question is line-ending enforcement. By default git for windows installs with the 'checkout crlf, commit lf', which won't work for a bunch of source that is (as far as I'm aware) exclusively comprised of crlf endings.

I don't know that I'd blindly trust any given dev to configure this correctly even given instruction, so I'm considering one (or both) of the following but was curious if anyone here had gone another route.

• A pre-commit hook that checks for any lf line endings (or maybe all lf line endings), and rejects in that event.

• An install script distributed to devs that populates the global config with the 'as-is, as-is'.

P.S. While writing this it occurred to me that the initial conversion from svn to git could commit the default way and as long as people stuck to the default that would be pretty seamless as well. Having been a dev using git in a .NET shop that installed git with the non-default 'as-is, as-is', I've created my own issues there too (they'd all rolled default prior to my arrival). So I'm still leaning towards some sort of enforcement mechanism.

To answer the question of how to enforce something locally, you can't without doing some very heavy lifting around managing and enforcing the state of every developers workstation, and I'm usually of the opinion that developers should probably be local admins on their development machine because if they aren't then they will just spend their time figuring our how to get those privileges anyway.

And that's probably because you shouldn't need to care about the state of local configuration when using distributed version control. You should only care about the state of your configuration. Assuming you are using git as a centralised version control system, because that's what basically everyone does anyway because its easiest, then let's just assume that "your" configuration is the copy of code saved on the central server.

If this is the case then you shouldn't accept merges that, as you mentioned, break crlf/lf line endings. So you enforce that when some other client tries to push changes you with server side logic that rejects the request to pollute your repo with their potentially breaking stylistic choices.

StackExchange DevOps Q#938, answer score: 6