Rugged doesn't seem to aknowledge core.attributesFile (falling back to $HOME/.config/git/attributes) or $(prefix)/etc/gitattributes as specified in the docs when fetching attributes for a path with repo.fetch_attributes(path).
git check-attr handles that so this is either on Rugged side or libgit2 (against which I don't have the competence to test).
(related to github-linguist/linguist#4283)