Suggested behavior when pulling .gitattributes

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.