Empty directories...

GIT(7) -- 03/05/2007

NAME
	git - the stupid content tracker

Well, I use git for tracking contents. That means, for example, installation trees for some application. Let's take a typical TeXlive tree as an example. Those trees contain, among other things, directories where new fonts/formats/whatever get placed as things run. Quite a few of them start out empty, but their permissions have to correspond to their purpose (for example, some are world-writable).

I see little chance to get this achieved without doing something like

find -type d -empty -execdir touch {}/.git-this-is-empty +

before every checkin and

find -name .git-this-is-empty -exec rm -- {} +

after every checkout.  Which is pretty stupid.

As some anecdotal stuff, I did something like

mkdir test cd test git-init touch README git-add README # another peeve: why is no empty reference point possible? git-commit -a -m "Initial branch" git checkout -b newbranch master unzip ../somearchive -d subdir git add subdir git commit -a -m "Add subdir" git checkout -b newbranch2 master

and expect to have a clean slate. No such luck: without warning, all empty directories in the zip file are still remaining within subdir, which as a consequence has not been cleaned up.

So even if one is of the opinion that empty directories are not worth putting into the repository: if I check in an entire subdirectory hierarchy and then switch to a branch where this subdirectory is not existent, I expect the subdirectory to be _gone_, and not have some littering of empty directories lying around.

And that git-diff can see nothing wrong with that does not really improve things.

So if git is supposed to be a content tracker, I can't see a way around it actually being able to track content, and empty directories _are_ content. It can't let them flying around with arbitrary permissions on them when I switch branches or tags. And the workaround using "touch" mentioned above is really awful to do manually all the time.

Could git technically track a file with a zero-length filename in empty directories if one tells it explicitly to include it, like with git-add \! -x "" subdir or has somebody a better idea or interface or rationale? I understand that there are use cases where one does not bother about empty directories, but for a _content_ tracker, not tracking directories because they are empty seems quite serious.

Ok, kill me. This must likely be the most common FAQ/rant/whatever concerning git.