Re: [RFC PATCH] Re: Empty directories...

From: Julian Phillips <julian@quantumfyre.co.uk>
Date: Jul 20, 2007, 22:36 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0707202320300.16498@reaper.quantumfyre.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0707201421110.27249@woody.linux-foundation.org>

On Fri, 20 Jul 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:

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>
>
> On Fri, 20 Jul 2007, Johan Herland wrote:
>>
>> Does this mean that you are firmly opposed to the concept of storing
>> directories in the index/tree as such, or that you are only opposed to
>> (some of) the implementation ideas that have been discussed so far?
>
> I've already sent out a *patch* to do so, for chissake. It handled all
> these cases perfectly fine, as far as I know, but I didn't test it all
> that deeply (and made it clear when I sent that patch out).
>
> In fact, in this whole pointless discussion, I think I'm so far the only
> one to have done anything constructive at all. Sad.

There was Dscho's .gitignore based patch too ...

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>
> So here's my standpoint:
>
> - people who use git natively might as well use the ".gitignore" trick.
>   It really *does* work, and there really aren't any downsides. Those
>   directories will stay around forever, until you decide that you don't
>   want them any more. Problem solved.
>
>   Sure, if you export the git archive into some other format, you might
>   well want to do something about the ".gitignore" files (like just
>   delete them, since they won't be meaningful in an SVN environment, for
>   example, but you might also just convert them into SVN's "attributes"
>   or whatever it is that SVN uses to ignore files).

Personally I quite like this approach - I'm going to use it to keep all the empty directories from Subversion in my importer. It seems to address everthing quite neatly.

I don't really understand the objections ... especially since I can't see why you want an empty directory if you're not going to put _something_ in it - in which case, presumably you want to ignore it (so maybe a .gitignore containing * would be better than an empty one)? However, I'm sure that if people want it, they have a reason.

> SCM is too important to play games with. Git gets things right, and I
> doubt people really _realize_ that the "tracks content" is why git is so
> much better, and why git can do merges so much faster and more reliably
> than anybody else.

This is the thing that made me interested in git back in April '05.  I 
couldn't see what we were going to end up with at that point - but I was 
_convinced_ that due to the underlying design it was worth watching. 
Being a python type (sorry ... :$) hg looked interesting when it sprang up 
- but they threw away what I considered to be one of the most compelling 
features of git (at the time there wasn't the wealth of really nice tools 
that we now have).

In fact, I really should say "Thank you Linus", since I came that close to writing an SCM from scratch myself - having been using Subversion with branches for quite some time (and CVS before that - and yes I do mean branches + CVS). Now I no longer feel the need to write an SCM - just a longing to use git. git is probably better than anything I would have come up with too. :D

-- 
Julian

  ---
She is descended from a long line that her mother listened to.
 		-- Gypsy Rose Lee