Feature Request: existence-only tracking

Feature Request: existence-only tracking

[Brett Trotter]

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.

Re: Feature Request: existence-only tracking

[Andreas Krey]

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