Re: [PATCH] git-status: Show empty directories

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jun 11, 2012, 16:57 UTC
Message-ID: <7vehpl7pn0.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <CAA3EhHLWDtUeNB+RZA064Omwxh7SEYhSc53U0nuiSTNzioKnug@mail.gmail.com>

Leila <muhtasib@gmail.com> writes:

Show 16 quoted lines

>> Having said all that, I personally doubt this is a useful change.  I
>> may have thought of adding a README file to a relatively new project that
>> does not yet have one while in shower but I haven't even created the
>> file in the working tree.  And I forget about it once I get to the
>> office.  Should the system remind me to create README and then add?
>> Your patch would not give me such a reminder once the top-level
>> directory is populated (because it is no longer empty).  Even if I
>> were planning to add Documentation/README instead, I would get such
>> a reminder only if the Documentation directory is empty. Once the
>> directory is populated, I wouldn't get "create README and then add".
>> Why should an empty directory so special?
>
> So there are two separate discussions here:
> 1) Should empty dirs be tracked
>
> 2) Should empty dirs appear under 'untracked' in git status

You are not answering my question by asking either these two questions.

Please read what you quoted again. I may have forgotten to create and add README

 - at the toplevel directory; or

 - in the Documentation directory that already has other tracked
   files; or

 - in the Documentation directory that does not have any file yet.

Why do I get a reminder for only the last case? Also please realize that at no point in the scenario I am interested in adding an empty directory. "How does one add empty directories" is irrelevant to my question.

A more reasonable answer would have been "the reminder is not about a yet-to-be-created README file, but is about an empty directory you might have wanted to place something---there is no way for Git to guess that you wanted the new file to be README, but at least having a totally empty directory laying around may be an indication that you wanted to do something intereseting in it but haven't yet". If the proposed commit log message justified the behaviour to treat only the third one specially that way, I suspect it may make some sense.