Meta files: What is the "fileFormatVersion"?

Questions & Answers
1

What is its purpose and, above all, why does it change out of the blue?

It’s breaking our git when changing from mac to pc (or vice-versa), but that might be beyond this question’s point. When fetching from either end, it goes from 1 to 2 - and only in some apparently random meta files, not all of them get changed. Like this:

- fileFormatVersion: 1
+ fileFormatVersion: 2
guid: cfbadcfd53f62afc5623fbadafbc3ab56
2

I have a hypothesis that fileFormatVersion governs to the line endings that Unity expects in a script file. (See newline - Difference between CR LF, LF and CR line break types - Stack Overflow for more info on CRLF versus LF).

I have not verified this with experimentation, but I am guessing that fileFormatVersion: 1 indicates Windows files (using CRLF) and fileFormatVersion: 2 indicates Mac files (using just LF).