Re: empty directories

From: Salikh Zakirov <salikh@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 22, 2007, 04:31 UTC
Message-ID: <fage86$hui$1@sea.gmane.org>
In-Reply-To: <1187716461.5986.71.camel@beauty>

Josh England wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> Git doesn't seem to allow me to add an empty directory to the index, or
> even nested empty directories.  Is there any way to do this?  What is
> the reasoning?  I've got a use case where having empty directories in my
> git repository would be *very* valuable.  Any information and help is
> greatly appreciated.

While the the other replies provided a historical background of how exactly git handles directories and why it wasn't storing empty directories, there is no fundamental reason for empty directories not being stored, it's just nobody got to implement it.

Linus Torvalds posted an untested patch in a recent discussion and requested that anyone interested in this functionality continued development and testing.

Design discussion: http://lists-archives.org/git/624494-empty-directories.html
Patch: http://marc.info/?l=git&m=118480075313827&w=2

Johannes Schindelin also posted an alternative implementation, which emulates empty dirs by adding empty .gitignore placeholder to the index. http://marc.info/?l=git&m=118484785410247&w=2

You could also read the long discussion of the subtle semantic issues that storing empty directories introduces in the mail thread accessible from above links.