Re: [PATCH v3 1/1] Introduce git add --renormalize .

[Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>]

Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com> writes:

> I _could_ understand if this functionality lived in, say, a new
> command git-attr:
> ...
> (I have since read the thread in which Junio's suggested[1] that
> git-add could house this functionality, but it still feels too
> high-level.)

If this were part of a hypothetical "git attr" command, I would have
a hard time understanding it.  I would view the "attr" as attributes
attached to each path, telling various things about the path, one of
which may be how contents are handled between Git and the file on
the filesystem.  In other words, "attr" is _not_ contents; it is a
set of attributes attached to path that house the contents.

What we are correcting here at this point in the expected usecase is
not an attribute.  We are correting the contents, and between the
two potential sources of "the right version" of the contents, the
user tells that the filesystem is the right one, so "add" is used
to correct mistakes in the index based on what is in the filesystem
(if we were correcting the other way, like Jonathan said in the
message in the thread you read, "checkout" would be used to correct
the filesystem version using what is in the index).