Subject: [PATCH] attr: a note about the order of .gitattributes lookup

From: Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2012 20:55:52 +0700

This is the documentation part of

1a9d7e9 (attr.c: read .gitattributes from index as well. - 2007-08-14)
06f33c1 (Read attributes from the index that is being checked out - 2009-03-13)

Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <[email-masked]>
---
 I looked around but did not see anywhere mentioning this. If I did
 not miss anything, then we should take a note about this to avoid
 surprises.

 Resend, this time git@vger is CCed. Sorry for the noise.

 Documentation/gitattributes.txt | 6 ++++++
 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+)

diff --git a/Documentation/gitattributes.txt b/Documentation/gitattributes.txt
index 99ed04d..8c52a99 100644
--- a/Documentation/gitattributes.txt
+++ b/Documentation/gitattributes.txt
@@ -66,6 +66,12 @@ is from the path in question, the lower its precedence). Finally
 global and system-wide files are considered (they have the lowest
 precedence).
 
+Normally if `.gitattributes` is not found in a directory in work tree,
+the same path in the index is examined. If there's a `.gitattributes`
+version in the index, that version will be used. During checkout process,
+the order of examination is reversed: index version is preferred over
+the work tree version.
+
 If you wish to affect only a single repository (i.e., to assign
 attributes to files that are particular to
 one user's workflow for that repository), then
-- 
1.7.12.1.406.g6ab07c4