Git attributes and Mercurial attributes

[Georges Racinet]

Dear Mercurial users,

(as a reminder, I am the maintainer of Heptapod, the DevOps platform 
based on GitLab that supports Mercurial).

The Git world has a conventional potentially checked-in `.gitattributes` 
file, which allows to tweak some behaviour in a shared way. It is 
implemented in the standard `git` command [1]. For instance, in GitLab, 
it can be used to teach the programmings language detection about the 
file extensions that you are actually using.

I've been postponing its implementation in HGitaly, Heptapod's Mercurial 
backend, because up to now the main application was simply ignoring it 
if not implemented. However, this has changed recently, and to put it 
short, another useful user feature [1] depends on it, hence I'm about to 
do it.

For various reasons, Heptapod will have to take files named 
`.gitattributes` into account, but it would be unnatural indeed if that 
was the only option, so I'm willing to introduce a `.hgattributes` 
alongside. But that is setting a precedent.

Now my questions :

- is there any other existing similar convention in the Mercurial world ?

- any suggestions about the actual file name

I can start with just `.gitattributes`, but I am willing to release the 
feature with Heptapod 1.5, that should happen around the end of April.


Best,


[1] see `man gitattributes` and `man git-check-attr`

[2] the feature in question is the automatic folding of generated code 
in diff views.

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