Re: .gittattributes handling has deficiencies

>>>> 
>>>> What do you mean by "checking out everything"?
>>>> Which command do you propose?
>>> 
>>> something like git checkout -f
>> 
>> I suspected this. I see two problems:
>> 
>> 1) it's too dangerous: I throws away _all_ changes, not only
>> changes that are related to gitattributes.
>
> this is true, the question of if this is 'too dangerous' depends on what 
> workflow you teach as safe. if you teach that checking out a new version will 
> loose any modifications you have made (which is useually the sane thing to do 
> by default anyway) then this is just more of the same
>
>> 2) it doesn't work reliably. git checkout -f will only update
>> files that git detects as changed. But you could have files that
>> should have crlf in the working copy but actually have only lf.
>> Those would not be updated.
>
> ok, you could do rm -r * before doing the checkout -f (or there's probably a 
> option to git to tell it not to preserve changes to the working area, I am 
> not a git guru.
>
>> I'll not recommend this. Not using .gitattributes is the only
>> sane solution.
>
> it may be the best thing to do for you and your users, that's not the same 
> thing as saying that it's the only sane solution.