Re: Handling empty directories in Git

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Apr 8, 2014, 17:36 UTC
Message-ID: <87zjjvg1v1.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org>
In-Reply-To: <vpqob0blpna.fsf@anie.imag.fr>

Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr> writes:

Show 9 quoted lines

> The reason would be closer to "there is a valuable reason, but not
> valuable enough to change Git to do it". It's actually not so easy to
> track directories properly. Storing them in the Git repository is
> actually possible (actually, an empty tree is a special case of this,
> and is obviously supported), but defining and implementing a decent
> behavior for each Git command wrt this is not trivial.
>
> David Kastrup gave it a try a few years ago. I don't remember exactly
> what made him give up, but it was never completed and merged.

Oh, most likely what afflicts most of my unfinished projects. I lost focus at some point of time. I don't remember any fundamentally unsolvable problems, but then I don't remember much at all. There were some annoyances with sorting order (either regarding the sorting of xxx/ or . or ./ or whatever) and some other stuff.

If anybody wants to take a look at the direction of unfinished stuff, I can see whether there are some old backups with git repos in my possession. But I really have no idea how much of the design might have ended up in actual comments or code, and how much on some scraps of paper or half-committed memory, and how much of that might have been invalidated by other scraps of paper and half-committed memory.

So there is not likely to be more than food for thought recoverable.

I'm amused that you remember me being involved with that. I think I myself had forgotten all about it until recently. I don't even recollect what made me remember again: looking at some old repo/commit or searching in some old mailing list archive.

-- 
David Kastrup