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

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jul 22, 2007, 17:28 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0707221023530.3607@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <85abtpoydg.fsf@lola.goethe.zz>

On Sun, 22 Jul 2007, David Kastrup wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> 
> > I told you. Several times. That "." is pointless exactly because
> > it's in _every_ tree, and as such is no longer "content".
> 
> "." is in every _non-empty_ directory tree.

You're pointless.

We have no problems at all with non-empty trees. We know exactly what they are. We keep track of them fine, and we do not need a totally pointless "." entry for them.

>  But we are talking about
> permitting _empty_ trees in the repository.

And WE ALREADY DO.

The empty tree looks like this: "". It has a SHA1 of 4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904. It works today, and in fact, git uses it already.

Try this:

	git ls-tree 4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904

in the git repository. What do you think that is?

Your "." is *pointless*.

And it's _worse_ than pointless: it's not "content". It doesn't add any information. It's not something you can match up against the working tree meaningfully, exactly because *every* working tree has it. As such, it's total non-information.

		Linus