On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 8:47 AM, Ian Jackson
<ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> Nishanth Aravamudan writes ("Bug#861364: dgit: empty directories are not
> representable"):
>> At least src:software-properties has at one time had empty directories
>> in the source package, e.g. in 0.96.20.5 in xenial on Ubuntu, and git
>> (and thus dgit (via import-dsc) and the Ubuntu git importer) fail to
>> properly represent the srcpkg's contents in the import.
>>
>> Specifically, tests/aptroot/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/ is missing from either
>> import.
>
> Presumably the package breaks without this ?
Yeah, in this case, a developer built a new srcpkg using our imported
tree and it failed to pass the autopkgtests, which depended on this
directory existing.
>> Given that git does not represent empty directories, I'm not sure what
>> we should do here?
>
> Call it a bug in git ? :-) I know that doesn't really help.
Yeah -- Robie is working on fixing git.
> My initial plan was to simply ignore empty directories and hope that
> it didn't matter. If they do matter then we probably don't have a
> good answer.
Agreed -- I think it is generically not possible to know if a given
empty directory matters or not. But it does mean if a goal is to
represent the exact contents of a given source package in the
corresponding git commit -- that's not achievable in the presence of
empty directories, at least by default.
I wanted to file this mostly so our importer and dgit did the same
thing for cases like this :)
