Re: Empty directories...

On Wednesday 18 July 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Didn't I say I do not have an objection for somebody who wants
to track empty directories, already?  I probably would not do
that myself but I do not see a reason to forbid it, either.

The right approach to take probably would be to allow entries of
mode 040000 in the index.  Traditionally, we allowed only 100644
(blobs as regular files) and 120000 (blobs as symlinks).  We
recently added 160000 (commit from outer space, aka subproject).

And we do that for all directories, not just empty ones.  So if
you have fileA, empty/, sub/fileB tracked, your index would
probably have these four entries, immediately after read-tree
of an existing tree object:

Sorry for jumping in late...

Why do you want to add _all_ directories, and not just the ones we want to 
explicitly track (independent of whether they're empty or not).

Basically, add a "--dir" flag to git-add, git-rm and friends, to tell them 
you're acting on the directory itself (rather than its (recursive) 
contents). "git-add --dir foo" will add the "040000 123abc... 0 foo" to the 
index/tree whether or not foo is an empty directory. "git-rm --dir foo" will 
remove that entry (or fail if it doesn't exist), but _not_ the contents of 
foo.

Since we're making directory tracking _explicit_, this should all be trivially 
backward-compatible.


...Johan

-- 
Johan Herland, [off-list ref]
www.herland.net