gitattributes error ‘ is not a valid attribute name’
You’re setting an attribute value, but you’ve put spaces around the equals sign. Just remove the spaces!
Instead of:
.htaccess merge = ours
Consider:
.htaccess merge=ours
Symptom
You add a new gitattributes file or line and run git status, and receive this error or similar:
is not a valid attribute name: .gitattributes:1
Cause
Now, I copied and pasted my gitattributes from the book where the example has spaces around the equals, but it turns out this is just plain wrong. As given in gitattributes(5) man page:
Each line in gitattributes file is … a pattern followed by an attributes list, separated by whitespaces.
It’s now been fixed in the GitHub version of the book, but I don’t know when that’ll be published to git-scm.
Written 2015-09-29