[RFC] Storing empty directories in Git

I sometimes need to store empty directories in Git, and instead of putting empty .gitignore files everywhere as has been suggested, I created two small shell scripts (git-store-dirs and git-restore-dirs) to store all empty directories in a file named ".emptydirs" at the top of the working tree. The directories are stored as null-separated strings to avoid problems with wacky things like \n or semicolons in the directory names.

Is this a viable method of fixing the emptydir problem? A default file name like ".gitdirectories" could be used, or maybe it’s possible to store a file like this inside the .git/ area if we can come up with a way to store this metadata properly.

The scripts are stored at http://gist.github.com/419015 , but I also include them here:

### git-store-dirs {{{

#!/bin/sh

# git-store-dirs # Store a list of all directories to $dirfile to be able to restore empty # directories. The list is \0-separated in case there are some directory names # containing (ugh) \n. Use git-restore-dirs(1) to recreate directories.

dirfile=.emptydirs test -d .git/. || { echo $0: Has to be run from the toplevel of the working tree >&2; exit 1; } find -type d -empty -print0 | grep -E -v -z '/\.git(/|$)' | LC_ALL=C sort -z >$dirfile git add $dirfile

### }}} ### git-restore-dirs {{{

#!/bin/sh

# git-restore-dirs # Restore empty directories created by git-store-dirs(1)

dirfile=.emptydirs test -d .git/. || { echo $0: Has to be run from the toplevel of the working tree >&2; exit 1; } test -e $dirfile || { echo $0: No $dirfile file found >&2; exit 1; } xargs -0 mkdir -p <$dirfile

### }}}

Cheers, Øyvind

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