check-attr doesn't respect recursive definitions

[Jan Larres <jan@majutsushi.net>]

Hi,

I am trying to write a custom archiving script that checks the
export-ignore attribute to know which files from an ls-files output it
should skip. Through this I noticed that for files in directories for
which the export-ignore (or any other) attribute is set, check-attr
still reports 'unspecified'. More precisely:

$ git init test
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/jan/test/.git/
$ cd test
$ mkdir foo
$ touch foo/bar
$ echo "foo export-ignore" > .gitattributes
$ git check-attr export-ignore foo
foo: export-ignore: set
$ git check-attr export-ignore foo/bar
foo/bar: export-ignore: unspecified

I would expect the last command to also report 'set'. I've also tried
other patterns like 'foo/' and 'foo*', but it didn't make any
difference. Is this expected behaviour? It does make checking the
attributes of single files somewhat more difficult.

git-archive ignores the directory as expected, but unfortunately it
doesn't have an option to just list the files it would archive instead
of actually archiving them.

This is with git version 1.7.10.4.

-Jan