[oe] Git versus Hg

[Esben Haabendal]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 9:58 AM, Koen Kooi <koen at dominion.kabel.utwente.nl>
wrote:

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> Philip Balister schreef:
> | Given the only serious contenders for possible SCM's for OE appear to be
> | git or Hg, I am curious about the expertise level available on this
> list.
>
> A big problem with git:
>
> * it cannot import a flat OE repository (e.g a mtn checkout of .dev)
> * it cannot import a OE repo with history (e.g with mtn2git)
>
> Why? Git can't store empty dirs, and we use that in a few key places in
> OE. Holger 'solved' that in mtn2git by putting in a lot .dummy files
> into those dirs, but those will end up in your packages and rootfses.
>

There is a patch for handling empty directories in git.
http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2007/7/18/252001
But it seems like the conclusion was tracking empty directories are not
necesarely such a good idea after all.

Other projects seems to have overcome it as well:
http://groups.google.com/group/rails-oceania/browse_thread/thread/2c8611dc93917952/e175f72310823547

Linus is all for adding tracking of empty directories, but is not working on
it himself.

I don't know if anybody is working on it, or if it really is of such vital
importance to us.
The alternative of adding a dummy file (fx. .gitignore) to those empty
directories that we do want to track, would of-course require that we have
these excluded when copying to fx. rootfs trees.

/Esben