On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 11:38:10AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote: > Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> writes: > > > I think we ended up deciding that it would be better to just disallow > > symlink .gitattributes (and .git*) from entering the index, the way we > > disallow ".git". > > Hmph, I thought we would need both, though. Or do we specifically > want to honor untracked .gitattributes that is left as a symlink > pointing to elsewhere in the filesystem or something like that? I wasn't going to worry about an untracked .gitattributes. The reasons for disallowing symlinked .gitattributes are: - it doesn't behave the same when accessed internally via the tree objects - malicious symlinks that try to leave the repository Neither of those issues is at play if your symlink .gitattributes file isn't tracked. So there's some inconsistency in the sense that it "works" until you try to "git add" it. But either you aren't going to add it (in which case it's a feature that it works), or you are going to add it, and you'll get notified then that it's disallowed. -Peff