Feature Request: existence-only tracking

Brett Trotter· May 23, 2013, 17:01 UTC · lore

In my work, we have a lot of autogenerated files that need to exist so a script will replace their contents, but tracking the contents creates a lot of unnecessary conflicts. I would love to see an option for a different tracking method that just makes sure a file or directory exists. This would also obviate the need for adding things like .empty files in a directory to force the directory to exist.

Andreas Krey· May 23, 2013, 21:00 UTC · re: Brett Trotter · lore

Re: Feature Request: existence-only tracking

On Thu, 23 May 2013 12:01:43 +0000, Brett Trotter wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> In my work, we have a lot of autogenerated files that need to exist so
> a script will replace their contents, but tracking the contents
> creates a lot of unnecessary conflicts. I would love to see an option
> for a different tracking method that just makes sure a file or
> directory exists.

You could probably do this via the clean/smugde filters via .gitattributes.

But really this loooks like suboptimal build design. You should change the generator to not require an (empty/) file beforehand, or change the build process to create those files before invoking the generator. (Likewise empty directories that are neeed in the build should be created by the build, not by the versioning system.)

All IMHO.

Andreas

-- 
"Totally trivial. Famous last words."
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@*.org>
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:29:21 -0800