Hi,
I ran into a problem with line endings that .gitattributes is supposed to fix. However, I ran into a headache with this not giving the desired result. This headache could have easily been avoided if:
When pulling .gitattributes, git should parse the file and anything new in it should be acted upon. Specifically, if a file already exists with modified endings and .gitattributes now says it should be treated as binary, then please automatically re-checkout the file with the correct, un-modified line endings.
Possibly this suggestion also applies to pushing/committing but that wasn't the problem I ran into just now.