git crlf configuration in mixed environment

Question

I'm running a mixed environment, and keep a central, bare repository where I pull and push most of my stuff. This centralized repository runs on Linux, and I check out to Windows XP/7, Mac and Linux. In all repositories I put the following line in my .git/config:

[core]
     autocrlf = true

I don't have the flag safecrlf=true anywhere. First time when I modify stuff on my one Windows machine (XP) there is no problem and when I look at the diff, it looks fine. But when I do the same on the other Windows machine (7), all lines are shown as changed but local line endings are \r\n as expected (when checked in a hex editor). The same applies to a MacOSX can. Sometimes I get the feeling that the different systems wrestle on line endings, but I can't be sure (I'm loosing track of all the times I change specific files).

I didn't use to have the autocrlf set, but set the flag many months back. Could that be causing my current problems? Do I need to clone everything again to loose some old baggage? Or are there other things that needs configuring too? I tried git checkout -- . about a million times, but with no success.

Answer 1

You need to set autocrlf to true on each machine you are working on (in global), or for each copy of the repository (in local). The settings of the repo you cloned from are not applied to your local repo.

The other answer is that you have a mixture of line endings in the files in your repo.

A filter on checkout could be setup for each of the source file type to correct their line endings, and on checkin to reset them to the repo standard.