Re: Empty directories...

Hi,

On Wed, 18 Jul 2007, David Kastrup wrote:

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

On Wed, 18 Jul 2007, David Kastrup wrote:

quoted

The FAQ answer is weazeling on several accounts:

a) No, git only cares about files, or rather git tracks content and
   empty directories have no content.

In the same manner as empty regular files have no contents, and git
tracks those.  Existence and permissions are important.

We do not track permissions of directories at all.

Ok, this seems like something that should be done as well, even if we
can stipulate at first that a directory should have rwx for the user
in question if you hope to track it.

No, no, no.  It should not be tracked.  It is the responsibility of the 
_user_ to set it to something sane, be that by a umask or by sticky 
groups, or by setting the permissions of the parent directory.

It is _nothing_ we want to put into the repository.  That is the _wrong_ 
place to put it.

quoted

This is because Git is primarily meant to track source code,

Tell that to the man page.  It declares git to be "a content tracker" 
right at the front.

Why don't you?  I have no problems with the title.

quoted

and most "permissions" (i.e.  restrictions) do not make any sense
there.

So why are permissions for files being tracked, then?

This question is invalid.  Git only tracks the _executable_ bit.  And 
again, it is the users' responsibility, by setting the umask, to have the 
appropriate bits set for group and others.

quoted

quoted

b) The problem is not just that empty directories don't get added 
into the repository.  They also don't get removed again when 
switching to a different checkout.  When git-diff returns zero, I 
expect a subsequent checkout to not leave complete empty hierarchies 
around because git can't delete any empty leaves which it chose not 
to track.

I _like_ the behaviour that Git does not remove a directory it
added, when I put some untracked file into it.

But it does not remove a directory it _refused_ to add when there were
no files at all in it ever.  You probably have not read the problem
description carefully.

I have.  But that does not apply here, because I used the term "to add a 
directory" in the sense of "mkdir".

quoted

And switching back to that branch, Git has no problems, because it 
sees that the directory is already there.  In case of a file, it would 
complain, and rightfully so.

And if you switch to a branch where the directory it did not remove now 
is a file?

Git already throws an error, and rightfully so.  I am pleased by the 
current behaviour.

quoted

See the fundamental difference between a file and a directory now?

Condescension is not really solving a problem.

Hey, I only tried to help clarify things.

But since I seem to be unable to, I'll end my efforts with this 
suggestion:

If you want to track empty directories, the best thing would be to

- teach git-add to automatically create an empty .gitignore (and error out 
  if that already exists), and

- teach git-archive to not put .gitignore files into the output by default 
  (but the directories).  This might be a sensible change regardless if 
  you want to add empty directories to the repository or not.

Ciao,
Dscho