File permission issue with Mac/Windows when using git
This isn't really answering your original question, but I hope to highlight another issue I ran into when attempting to trying @drewag's proposed solution...
Another issue I ran into when attempting to ignore file permissions, regardless of whether it was on a Windows or Mac machine (more prevelant on the Windows machine!), was the problem global vs. project-level configurations.
Running this command did not affect the .gitconfig file in my C:\Users\Username folder:
git config core.filemode falseAlthough adding the --global flag did affect the change I was looking for:
git config --global core.filemode falseHope this helps someone solve some of their headaches!
If you don't care about file permissions, you can just tell your repository to ignore file permission:
git config core.filemode false