End of Line Conversion

EOL conversion is provided as a content filter where Bazaar internally stores a canonical format but outputs a convenience format. See bzr help content-filters for general information about using these.

Note: Content filtering is only supported in recently added formats, e.g. 1.14. Be sure that both the repository and the branch are in a recent format. (Just setting the format on the repository is not enough.) If content filtering does not appear to be working, use ‘bzr info -v’ to confirm that the branch is using “Working tree format 5” or later.

EOL conversion needs to be enabled for selected file patterns using rules. See bzr help rules for general information on defining rules. Currently, rules are only supported in $BZR_HOME/.bazaar/rules (or %BZR_HOME%/bazaar/2.0/rules on Windows). Branch specific rules will be supported in a future verison of Bazaar.

To configure which files to filter, set eol to one of the values below. (If a value is not set, exact is the default.)

Value	Checkout end-of-lines as	Commit end-of-lines as
native	crlf on Windows, lf otherwise	lf
lf	lf	lf
crlf	crlf	lf
exact	No conversion	Exactly as in file

Note: For safety reasons, no conversion is applied to any file where a null byte is detected in the file.

For users working on a cross-platform project, here is a suggested rule to use as a starting point:

[name *]
eol = native

If you have binary files that do not contain a null byte though, be sure to add eol = exact rules for those as well. You can do this by giving more explicit patterns earlier in the rules file. For example:

[name *.png]
eol = exact

[name *]
eol = native

If your working tree is on a network drive shared by users on different operating systems, you typically want to force certain conventions for certain files. In that way, if a file is created with the wrong line endings or line endings get mixed during editing, it gets committed correctly and gets checked out correctly. For example:

[name *.bat]
eol = crlf

[name *.sh]
eol = lf

[name *]
eol = native

If you take the care to create files with their required endings, you can achieve almost the same thing by using eol = exact. It is slightly safer to use lf and crlf though because edits accidentally introducing mixed line endings will be corrected during commit for files with those settings.

If you have sample test data that deliberately has text files with mixed newline conventions, you can ask for those to be left alone like this:

[name test_data/]
eol = exact

[name *]
eol = native

Note that exact does not imply the file is binary but it does mean that no conversion of end-of-lines will be done. (Bazaar currently relies of content analysis to detect binary files for commands like diff. In the future, a binary = true rule may be added but it is not supported yet.)

If you have an existing repository with text files already stored using Windows newline conventions (crlf), then you may want to keep using that convention in the repository. Forcing certain files to this convention may also help users who do not have rules configured. To do this, set eol to one of the values below.

Value	Checkout end-of-lines as	Commit end-of-lines as
native-with-crlf-in-repo	crlf on Windows, lf otherwise	crlf
lf-with-crlf-in-repo	lf	crlf
crlf-with-crlf-in-repo	crlf	crlf

For users working on an existing project that uses Windows newline conventions in their Bazaar repository, this rule is suggested as a starting point:

[name *]
eol = native-with-crlf-in-repo

For new projects, it is recommended that end-of-lines be stored as lf and that users stick to the basic settings, i.e. native, lf, crlf and exact.

Note: Bazaar’s EOL conversion will convert the content of files but never reject files because a given line ending or mixed line endings are found. A precommit hook should be used if you wish to validate (and not just convert) content before committing.