I can count the number of times I've had binary file corruption due to line ending conversion on zero hands. And I'm old enough to have used FTP extensively. Seems kind of unnecessary.
“Modern” FTP clients would auto detect if you were sending text or binary files and thus disable line conversations for binary.
But go back to the 90s and before, and you’d have to manually select whether you were sending text or binary data. Often these clients defaulted to text and so you’d end up accidentally corrupting files if you weren’t careful.
And, if you were using a Windows client talking to a Unix server, you didn't want to get a text file in binary mode, since most programs at the time couldn't handle Unix line endings. This is much better nowadays, to the point that it rarely matters on either side of the platform divide which type of line endings you use.
> I don't understand why the default would be anything but "commit the file as is"
Because it’s not uncommon for dev tools on Windows to generate DOS line endings when modifying files (for example when adding an element to an XML configuration file, all line endings of the file may be converted when it is rewritten out from its parsed form), and if those where committed as-is, you’d get a lot of gratuitous changes in the commit and also complaints from the Unix users.
For Git, the important thing is to have a .gitattributes file in the repository with “* text=auto” in it (plus more specific settings as desired). The text/binary auto-detection works mostly fine.
Up until just a few years ago, Notepad on Windows could not handle Unix-style line endings. It probably makes sense now to adopt the as-is convention, but for a while, it made more sense to convert when checking out, and then to prevent spurious diffs, convert back when committing.
Line endings between windows and unix-like systems were so painful that when I started development on my shell scripting language, I wrote a bunch of code to all Linux to handle Windows files and visa versa.
Though this has nothing to do with FTP. I’d already abandoned that protocol by then.
But go back to the 90s and before, and you’d have to manually select whether you were sending text or binary data. Often these clients defaulted to text and so you’d end up accidentally corrupting files if you weren’t careful.
The pain was definitely real