Re: why still no empty directory support in git

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Dec 30, 2008, 07:45 UTC
Message-ID: <7viqp25coh.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <200812300758.41988.robin.rosenberg.lists@dewire.com>

Robin Rosenberg <robin.rosenberg.lists@dewire.com> writes:

> You can have an empty tree, but the index doesn't store them, so they
> would be lost on checkout/commit. Linus sketched a solution, but nobody
> took the bait. Seems doable if anyone really wants it, but I'm certain
> it adds a lot of special cases.

I think the original poster covered that "a lot of special cases" as "unclear semantics", and there are more. Do you want to have the presense of empty directory "sticky"? Perhaps it later becomes non-empty at some point; will the "will always present" attribute kept then? What happens when such a directory becomes empty later? What should happen when a branch that has such a directory with "sticky existence" and another branch with the same directory but without the stickiness are merged?

But I think one bigger reason missing from the list is that many people loudly talked about "wants", but nobody made convincing argument on "needs" of such a feature.