problems with clone and .gitattributes

["Leo Razoumov" <slonik.az@gmail.com>]

Hi Everyone,
I am using .gitattributes with clean/smudge filters to optimize
storage of OpenOffice binary files (zip compressed). So far it works
fine except for clone operation.
Apparently, "git clone" does not call smudge filter when checking out a branch.
I have to manually remove openoffice files and then do "git co -f" to
re-checkout them  again, this time smudge filter gets applied.

There is a little catch-22 problem here. .gitattributes are stored
in-tree and git clone does not know about these files existence until
it checks the tree out, by that time it is already too late to apply
filters.

Of course, there could be several obvious workarounds:

(1) git clone can redo checkout when it finds files affected by gitattributes

(2) before doing checkout "git clone" inspects tree-object and looks
for .gitattributes files. If found it checks them out first before all
other files. Now it can apply the attributes found as the checkout
process progresses.

IMHO, both workarounds are somewhat clumsy.
Is there anything cleaner that can be done to solve the problem?

--Leo--