Re: empty directories and git

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 16, 2010, 20:02 UTC
Message-ID: <m3aanhlapl.fsf_-_@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <CDEB2042-A498-4950-A3CD-27F111455234@sb.org>

Kevin Ballard <kevin@sb.org> writes:

> On Sep 16, 2010, at 1:32 AM, Andreas Ericsson wrote:
> 
> > You can't have empty directories in git.

Show 9 quoted lines

> Apologies to those who were CC'd on the original message, I'm
> resending to this list as I forgot to set plain text.
> 
> I've always wondered about that. Why do we still have this
> restriction? There is a sha1 hash that is equivalent to the empty
> tree (4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904). Why can't git just
> use that to represent an empty directory? I imagine things that
> touch the working copy may need to be updated to be aware of this,
> but the problem doesn't seem insurmountable.

If I understand it correctly the problem is that git index is flat structure that contains only file (blob) info; there is currently no place in it to store information that some empty directory was added.

Adding an extension to have directories in index was considered in the past; it could even speed up git a bit, I think.

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git