What will `* text=auto eol=lf` in gitattributes do?

Git 2.10 fixed this and now behaves as one would expect.

The answer is no, Git currently (as of 2.3) cannot do checkout EOL conversion with auto-detection of binary and text formats so that it processes text only. The workaround is either to specify eol=lf only for selected file types (e.g., *.txt) or, inversely, mark certain file types as binary using e.g. *.png binary).

Related: feature proposal on Git mailing list

* text=auto

This will correctly normalize text files in the repo. However, the second part (LF forcing on checkout) cannot be achieved easily today because adding eol=lf will unfortunately process binary files too. The only solution today is to mark certain types for conversion (e.g., *.txt eol=lf) or, inversely, mark certain types as binary (e.g., *.png binary).

Both of these suffer from the same issue: the specific file types must be listed explicitly in the .gitattributes file, which means that either the types must be known ahead of time or all developers must remember to update the .gitattributes file every time a new file type appears in the project. Which they won't.