check-attr doesn't respect recursive definitions

Hi,

I am trying to write a custom archiving script that checks the export-ignore attribute to know which files from an ls-files output it should skip. Through this I noticed that for files in directories for which the export-ignore (or any other) attribute is set, check-attr still reports 'unspecified'. More precisely:

$ git init test Initialized empty Git repository in /home/jan/test/.git/ $ cd test $ mkdir foo $ touch foo/bar $ echo "foo export-ignore" > .gitattributes $ git check-attr export-ignore foo foo: export-ignore: set $ git check-attr export-ignore foo/bar foo/bar: export-ignore: unspecified

I would expect the last command to also report 'set'. I've also tried other patterns like 'foo/' and 'foo*', but it didn't make any difference. Is this expected behaviour? It does make checking the attributes of single files somewhat more difficult.

git-archive ignores the directory as expected, but unfortunately it doesn't have an option to just list the files it would archive instead of actually archiving them.

This is with git version 1.7.10.4.

-Jan