Re: why still no empty directory support in git

From: Asheesh Laroia <asheesh@asheesh.org>
Date: Jan 2, 2009, 21:31 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0901021626580.2099@rose.makesad.us>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.00.0901021954410.30769@pacific.mpi-cbg.de>

On Fri, 2 Jan 2009, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> Hi,

Hi

*wipes the egg off his face*

Show 17 quoted lines

> On Thu, 1 Jan 2009, Jeff King wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 03:58:46AM -0500, Asheesh Laroia wrote:
>>
>>> So, let's say I take your suggestion.
>>>
>>> $ touch ~/Maildir/new/.exists
>>> $ git add ~/Maildir/new/.exists && git commit -m "La di da"
>>>
>>> Now a spec-compliant Maildir user agent will attempt to deliver this new
>>> "email message" of zero bytes into the mail spool and assign it a message
>>> UID.  Doing so will remove it from Maildir/new.
>>
>> No. The maildir spec says:
>>
>>   A unique name can be anything that doesn't contain a colon (or slash)
>>   and doesn't start with a dot.

Oops.  I never actually tried this...

> For the record, I am using Git to manage my mails, and never had any 
> problems after installing a hook which marks new empty directories with 
> .gitignore.

I'll give that a shot, and my apologies for the noise on the list with regard to this particular example.

I do still believe that git shouldn't rmdir() empty directories behind the user's back, but with this particular use case gone I'm no longer as adamant as before.

My apologies for not having tested this earlier; I will test it shortly, but there's every reason to think that Johannes and Jeff are right!

-- Asheesh.

-- 
It's interesting to think that many quite distinguished people have
bodies similar to yours.