Re: [PATCH] git-status: Show empty directories

[Leila <muhtasib@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 12:57 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Leila <muhtasib@gmail.com> writes:
>
>>> Having said all that, I personally doubt this is a useful change.  I
>>> may have thought of adding a README file to a relatively new project that
>>> does not yet have one while in shower but I haven't even created the
>>> file in the working tree.  And I forget about it once I get to the
>>> office.  Should the system remind me to create README and then add?
>>> Your patch would not give me such a reminder once the top-level
>>> directory is populated (because it is no longer empty).  Even if I
>>> were planning to add Documentation/README instead, I would get such
>>> a reminder only if the Documentation directory is empty. Once the
>>> directory is populated, I wouldn't get "create README and then add".
>>> Why should an empty directory so special?
> Please read what you quoted again.  I may have forgotten to create
> and add README
>
>  - at the toplevel directory; or
>
>  - in the Documentation directory that already has other tracked
>   files; or
>
>  - in the Documentation directory that does not have any file yet.
>
> Why do I get a reminder for only the last case?  Also please realize
> that at no point in the scenario I am interested in adding an empty
> directory.  "How does one add empty directories" is irrelevant to my
> question.
>
> A more reasonable answer would have been "the reminder is not about
> a yet-to-be-created README file, but is about an empty directory you
> might have wanted to place something---there is no way for Git to
> guess that you wanted the new file to be README, but at least having
> a totally empty directory laying around may be an indication that
> you wanted to do something intereseting in it but haven't yet".  If
> the proposed commit log message justified the behaviour to treat
> only the third one specially that way, I suspect it may make some
> sense.

I apologize, I misread the scenario and thought you were asking a
different question.

The patch/new implementation I put forth reminds you that you have an
empty dir. The reminder that you have an empty dir  isn't about a
yet-to-be-created README file, but about an empty directory that you
may have wanted to do something interesting in but haven't yet (like
create a README/some other file or delete it even). It servers as
helpful reminder to do something with that empty dir. Is that better?