Git-attribute setting for line endings

[stschiff]

We currently have an attribute setting * text eol=lf in our .gitattributes file for this repository. I don't know exactly what it does, but it seems to convert CRLF-line endings to LF line endings upon commits. While this seems to be clever, as it implicitly "fixes" wrong Windows-line endings, it makes checksum-validation inconsistent between platforms.

If I locally commit a file with CRLF-endings and compute checksums, those checksums will not validate anymore on another user's platform if they have intermittently pulled my changes through git. This inconsistency is rather puzzling and surprising. I would suggest to remove this setting and accept "wrong" CRLF-line endings via git, and move the responsibility downstream to committing users, for example by adding a feature to `validate´ to check for line-endings.

[stschiff]

We need to discuss where we are with this.