Preserving ownership and set*id bits

I am tracking a development web server in git. The problem is that some of the scripts I am tracing are setgid. And certain files must have different ownership.

I assumed that git would preserve the setgid bit as well as the user and group of the files. Since it is described as the "stupid directory content manager" that just tracks the content of directories, I expected it would maintain at least as much information as tar. Oops. Color me stupid.

Anyway, I'm not here to complain, but I am looking for suggestions of how I might store and preserve this information as well.

I got bit when I did something equivalent to "git reset --hard HEAD^", to back out a change. I need someway of preserving this information across commits, clones, pushes, pulls, etc.

Our development has been centered around the idea of using git to track the changes to our development server and later "git pull" those changes to the production server with GIT_DIR pointing to an out-of-directory clone.