Android Studio - CRLF vs LF for a Git-based multiplatform project

Question

I'm working on an Android project involving multiple developers, some of which are on Windows, others Linux/MacOS. Since I'm on Windows, I've been instructed to configure Git as follows to avoid issues:

autocrlf = true
safecrlf = true

This works mostly fine. Any .java/XML/etc files I create in Android Studio are in CRLF, get converted to LF when I push them into the repo, then back into CRLF when I pull changes into my local copy. Problem is, some types of files, like vector drawable assets, get generated in LF instead, for some reason. So when I try to add them to Git, I get the "irreversible conversion" error:

I know I could set safecrlf = warn, but from what I understand, this carries a risk of corrupting binary files if Git mistakes them for text files, so I'm looking for a safer solution. For now I'm manually editing vector assets into CRLF before I add them to Git, which avoids the above error message, but gets tedious having to repeat the process for every file. Any way to force Android Studio to generate all local files in CRLF?

Answer 1

I would not set core.autocrlf to true (I advices against it since 2010): leave it to false.

Any file you want to be managed in a .gitattributes file, especially since Git 2.10. See the release note

echo "*.java text=auto eol=crlf" >.gitattributes

The combination has been fixed to be equivalent to doing

$ git config core.autocrlf true

With .gitattributes, you can limit that eol transformation to the precise set of files you want, instead of applying it blindly on all the repo files.
See more at "Checking-out and checking-in".

And with Git 2.16+, git add --renormalize . allows for converting all concerned files eol.