two factors for switching to Mercurial

[Ondrej Certik]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 6:13 PM, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2008-06-16 at 11:13 +0200, Martin Geisler wrote:
>> dvd at newfoundmarket.com writes:
>>
>> Hi
>>
>> > 1.  lack of support for empty directory. I saw workarounds such as
>> > creating hidden files. But these might not work well when
>> > unpredictable number/depth of empty directories are required for
>> > other applications to function correctly. [...]
>>
>> Mercurial does not version control directories -- I don't really know
>> why, though.
>
> It's very simple: almost all directories are implied by the existence of
> files. The main benefit of explicitly tracking directories is that you
> can track empty directories. And that's a whole lot of extra complexity
> to track a whole lot of nothing.

One argument for tracking empty directories is so that you can track
/etc in a mercurial repo (and do stuff like "hg clean") without
additional software to fix the empty dirs. The empty dirs in /etc are
needed, otherwise some programs/daemons in Debian stop working.

Ondrej