Re: How does Git know which files no longer needed during upgrade?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Mar 4, 2009, 12:38 UTC
Message-ID: <20090304123813.GA17521@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <loom.20090304T122643-455@post.gmane.org>

On Wed, Mar 04, 2009 at 12:28:07PM +0000, Stefan Näwe wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> > > cd /path/to/copy
> > > rm -rf *
> > > cp -a /path/to/new/version/* .
> > > git add -A
> > > git commit -m 'update foo to 2.0'
> > 
> > Nit: "rm -rf *" will miss files starting with '.'. So it is probably
> > simpler to say what you mean: delete all files managed by git:
> > 
> >   git ls-files -z | xargs -0 rm -f
> 
> But maybe one wants to keep a .gitignore file.

True. The problem is that you have no way of saying "give me all the files that git cares about, except the ones that I put there manually and not from this tarball." If you guess that dot-files are manual and everything else isn't, then that is easy, but not necessarily right.

If you tagged the last import, you use "git ls-tree" to get you the list of files just from the tarball.

-Peff