title: file ownership doesn't stay on git branch change
body: <p>Ok so I have an odd problem. </p>
  
  <p>I have a git project with several files. I accidently created, added and committed a file with the root user as the file owner rather than the user which I have set up as the owner for the rest of the project. I merged this file so that it is in both my master branch as well as in my dev branch. In both branches it reads that root is the owner of this file. </p>
  
  <p>So with my master branch checked out, I ran <code>chown user:user file.txt</code> to set the file to the usual user for the rest of the project. After doing an <code>ls -l</code> I see that the file now shows that "user" is now the owner and group. Great!</p>
  
  <p>Now if I go and checkout the dev branch and run an <code>ls -l</code> it shows the file is owned by root again. And if I checkout the master branch again it now shows that the file owner has changed back to being the root user rather than "user". </p>
  
  <p>I tried many things, but every time I checked out a branch that contained the file, the user was always set as "root" no matter how hard I tried to set it as "user". </p>
  
  <p>Am I doing something wrong? git shouldn't be storing the owner of the file, but yet it seems to be ignoring my ownership changes. </p>
  
  <p>Thanks. </p>