`git check-attr' problems & questions

I'm trying to use .gitattributes to use some custom properties that we have in an svn repository which is migrating to git, and there are some two big problems with it that I'm running into:

1. Looks like the path should always be the full path from the root,
   even if I'm currently in a subdirectory, so:

     cd $repo/foo/bar
     git check-attr foo -- some-file # doesn't work
     git check-attr foo -- foo/bar/some-file # works

   Worse, if I happen to have an attribute for a toplevel `foo' file,
   the first command produces that attribute.

2. I'm also trying to use an attribute on a hook script on the server
   (with the idea that email notifications are sent according to the
   set of modified files) -- but it looks like `git check-attr'
   doesn't work on a bare repository.  There's a "worse" part here
   too: instead of showing an error, it actually succeeds after
   showing that the attribute is "unspecified".

So my first question is -- am I missing something obvious? It almost looks like `check-attr' is intended only for low-level use...

Fixing the first problem seems like it would be easy with a quick shell script (maybe even with just an alias), but the second one is more troubling. Is there any way to do this on a bare repository without checking it out?

And the last question -- is there anything that does something like this customized email notifications that I'm trying to do? (That is: an attribute that determines recipients, then a `post-receive' hook that builds a list of modified files, grabs all the corresponding values of this attributes, and that's makes up the recipient list to notify.)