Re: Possible d/f conflict bug or regression

["Bryan Donlan" <bdonlan@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 3:13 AM, Christian Couder
<chriscool@tuxfamily.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>  When doing something like:
>
>  mkdir testdir &&
>         cd testdir &&
>         touch foo &&
>         git init &&
>         git add . &&
>         git commit -m 'Initial commit.' &&
>         rm foo &&
>         mkdir foo &&
>         git commit -a -m 'Test.'
>
>  I get:
>
>  Initialized empty Git repository in .git/
>  Created initial commit 3f945ca: Initial commit.
>   0 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
>   create mode 100644 foo
>  fatal: unable to index file foo
>
>  I think it's quite bad that it doesn't work.

What behavior would you expect this to have? IMO, it's not entirely
clear what the user means to do if they replace a file with an empty
directory, as an empty directory cannot be added to the index. Even
with a directory with contents, some of the contents may be junk (.o
for example) as far as the user is concerned.

Would a clearer diagnostic be a good solution? Something like:
fatal: foo: file replaced by directory.
Use git rm --cached or git add to specify how this should be handled.

Thanks,

Bryan