Subject: Re: A simpler approach to tracking directories

From: "J. Bruce Fields" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2007 17:45:40 -0400

On Sun, Jul 22, 2007 at 08:45:37PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
> Theodore Tso <[email-masked]> writes:
> > One of the fundamental things which falls out of the "Git Tracks
> > Contents" mantra is that information which you expect to be pushed
> > forward future revisions (as opposed to metadata which is specific
> > to a commit, such as the Author and Committer of a patch, the Commit
> > log, etc.) *MUST* be information which is realized in the working
> > tree.
> 
> For every _file_ in the working tree, there is _one_ bit of
> information in the repository that is not in the working tree: namely
> whether git is tracking this file at all.

Actually, no.  The index just stores data for a given set of files.  You
can think of the set of files for which data is stored in the index as
the set that is "tracked", but there's no independent
"tracked/untracked" bit, and no way of marking a path as tracked without
also adding content at that path.

--b.