Re: Empty directories...

From: Johan Herland <johan@herland.net>
Date: Jul 20, 2007, 08:29 UTC
Message-ID: <200707201029.10358.johan@herland.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vhco28aoq.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Wednesday 18 July 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> 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, <johan@herland.net>
www.herland.net