How to make change to .gitattributes take effect

Question

I\'m working on a project where we have recently started using git. The setup was not perfect from start, so I\'ve set up .gitattributes after people started cloning/working

Answer 1

osse on irc://chat.freenode.net/#git gave me this method, and it works reasonably well:

git rm -r :/ && git checkout HEAD -- :/

This will complain if you have uncommitted changes in your tree.

Seems like there should be a better way though.