A gitattributes file is a simple text file that gives attributes to pathnames. Certain operations by Git can be influenced by assigning particular attributes to a path.
You can find more information about how to edit git configuration in gitattributes Manual Page.
Dealing with line endings
In order to help on dealing with line endings and prepare the repository for our more common kinds of projects, we provided a recommended .gitattributes file that you can see in our GitHub repository.
Some text extracted from http://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes (CC BY SA 3.0)