Re: .gitignore, .gitattributes, .gitmodules, .gitprecious?, .gitacls? etc.

Dmitry Kakurin [off-list ref] writes:

I thought I did: I've observed that these problem are caused by
storing metadata in regular files (that exist both in repo/index and
in workplace).

And that observation solves the initial checkout issue how?

My knowledge of Git internals is quite limited, but if *I* were to do
it right now, I'd introduce a META entry in every TREE object that
would point to a BLOB that contains combined content of
.gitattributes, .gitignore etc.

A tree that has .gitattributes (and I am assuming in the longer
term you can use "ignore" and "precious" in .gitattributes
instead of using .gitignore) POINTS TO A BLOB already, so what
you are saying does not add anything to what we already have,
other than that you are renaming .gitattributes to "META ENTRY".

When you do "git checkout -- this-path", you are checking things
out from the index and at that point you may not have _any_ tree
yet (think "before initial commit").  A "META ENTRY" that exists
only in a tree does not work -- it has to come to index somehow
for it to work with how git works.