From: Junio C Hamano Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2010 23:08:10 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH 05/31] rebase: improve detection of rebase in progress Message-ID: <7vaajpv6lh.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org> In-Reply-To: <1293528648-21873-6-git-send-email-martin.von.zweigbergk@gmail.com> Martin von Zweigbergk writes: > Currently, the existence of rebase-merge/ is tested with 'test -d', > while the existence of rebase-apply/ is tested by creating the > directory and then deleting it again. Any good reason for this? I don't recall how the merge side reached the current shape of the code, but I think the rebase-apply one was that we wanted to make sure not only we don't have a directory but also we actually _can_ create one. If somebody had a bad permission set, "test -d" wouldn't help us much. We would fail later and error diagnosis codepath should do the right thing anyway, so it is not a correctness issue, but is more about attempting to notice an error early rather than late.