git-svn: Deleting directories

Russ Brown· Sep 24, 2007, 14:04 UTC · lore

I've just noticed that when deleting entire directory trees in git, when the dcommit happens only the files in that trees get deleted, which leaves a 'ghost town' of a directory tree with folders but no files, which will no doubt have somewhat confused my svn-using colleagues.

This is obviously an interoperability problem, but I understand that git does not track folders and is so tricky to fix.

The question though is how to handle it. Ideally, dcommit will detect that an entire directory has gone and send through a changeset which deletes just that one directory, instead of the current behaviour of explicitly deleting every file in the directory but leaving the directories themselves intact.

-- 
Russ

Adam Roben· Sep 24, 2007, 16:37 UTC · re: Russ Brown · lore

Re: git-svn: Deleting directories

Russ Brown wrote:

Show 14 quoted lines

> I've just noticed that when deleting entire directory trees in git, when
> the dcommit happens only the files in that trees get deleted, which
> leaves a 'ghost town' of a directory tree with folders but no files,
> which will no doubt have somewhat confused my svn-using colleagues.
>
> This is obviously an interoperability problem, but I understand that git
> does not track folders and is so tricky to fix.
>
> The question though is how to handle it. Ideally, dcommit will detect
> that an entire directory has gone and send through a changeset which
> deletes just that one directory, instead of the current behaviour of
> explicitly deleting every file in the directory but leaving the
> directories themselves intact.
>

There's a similar problem when renaming a directory. dcommit will essentially commit a series of moves of individual files rather than moving the whole directory. Again this is due to git not tracking directories. I should hope that whatever logic is used for detecting a directory removal may also be used for detecting a directory rename.

-Adam