Re: empty directories

From: Josh England <jjengla@sandia.gov>
Date: Aug 22, 2007, 21:25 UTC
Message-ID: <1187817948.5986.159.camel@beauty>
In-Reply-To: <20070821134030.b763e9d3.seanlkml@sympatico.ca>

On Wed, 22 Aug 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> On Wed, 22 Aug 2007, Salikh Zakirov wrote:
> > 
> > Linus Torvalds posted an untested patch in a recent discussion and requested
> > that anyone interested in this functionality continued development and testing.
> 
> That untested patch was seriously broken - it didn't do the sorting of 
> empty directories right. So it would need a lot of other work.
> 
> So I'm firmly back in the "just add a '.gitignore' file to the directory" 
> camp.

Woah. I just spent much of the morning reading the history of this thread. My eyes are still bleeding, but I think I'm sufficiently informed enough to be dangerous.

Without actually sticking my head in the honey pot surrounded by giant bears, I just want to relate a revision control scenario that I've been wanting to solve for several years. I deploy/maintain many linux clusters that each have a single system image to boot all nodes on the machines. My desire is to shove an *entire* image into a git repository, and simply have it do the right thing. Doing so and using clones/branches/merges to maintain these images would be extremely useful. I've attempted this concept with several SCMs using various workarounds for each but have abandoned each attempt mainly due to performance issues. Git shows the best performance by far (to the point of actually being usable) for this purpose.

Forget about special files as those are almost certainly a lost cause. I'm willing to use .gitignore in empty directories until a better solution presents itself. The main need is for file ownership/permission, which has been touched on before. When I clone an image, I really want an *identical* clone, in every way. It seems as though git had this functionality but scrapped it due to issues with umask and merge type problems? So the question is: would there be any way to bring this functionality back as a non-default configurable option? For those of us who need the functionality, we'd be more than willing to live with some of the side-effects.

The alternatives (involving wrappers and strict policy) just haven't been idiot-proof enough to be truly viable. It almost has to be a built-in capability. It looks like Nax is doing something close to this. Is there anyone else using trying to use git in a similar way?

-JE

PS:  I know this falls outside of git's intended use, but its the
closest thing to something that could work.