Tracking directories in Mercurial

[Matt Mackall]

On Mon, 2009-08-31 at 16:30 -0700, jeffm712 wrote:
> I know that right now Mercurial doesn't track directories. But in our
> projects, often the first thing we do is create a project structure.
> 
> Example: http://java.sun.com/blueprints/code/projectconventions.html#25692
> 
> I know I can get around the issue with dummy files, so this isn't a huge
> problem... but it's a big annoyance.

Seems to come with the territory.

> So I was wondering if the developers plan to add directory tracking, or if
> their answer for this is a rock solid "no."

Mercurial doesn't track directories on purpose. Directories contain no
interesting data from a source code revision control standpoint except
for the files contained therein. So not tracking directories explicitly
makes life simpler. The corner case of course is that empty directories
aren't tracked. And even some systems that do track directory trees (ie
Git) don't track empty directories, precisely because they introduce a
bunch of other corner cases (ie do we continue tracking a directory when
it becomes empty?)

So I'm not terribly interested. It's probably possible to add it via
some sort of backward-compatible hack but it's not on anybody's todo
list. 

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