Re: Branches & directories

[Hilco Wijbenga <hilco.wijbenga@gmail.com>]

On 17 August 2011 12:14, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> Evan Shelhamer <shelhamer@imaginarynumber.net> writes:
>
>> (in repo on your branch)
>> mkdir test_dir
>> touch test_dir/.gitkeep
>> touch test_file
>> git add *
>> git commit -m "test commit (with directory)"
>>
>> Will commit the directory as expected in your branch, and when you go
>> to checkout another branch it will not exist.
>
> ... unless you have untracked files in test_dir/, that is.
>
> If the branch you are switching to does not have anything at test_dir, you
> will not lose the untracked file because git does not remove test_dir/ nor
> its untracked contents.
>
> Depending on what you have at the path "test_dir" in the branch you are
> switching to, the actual rules are a bit more subtle than that, though.

Yes, I should have thought of that. The problem is with .gitignore. I
have a number of files ignored that are important but can't be shared.
So when I switch to 'master' the directory is not removed because it
contains untracked, ignored files. And, of course, git status does not
complain about them either because they are in .gitignore. :-)

This is still very annoying but hardly Git's fault (Git is working as
intended). It would be really nice, though, if Git could somehow
"stash" such files when checking out a different branch. In general, I
would prefer if uncommitted changes and untracked and/or ignored files
stuck to the branch where they were created. If I want to take them
with me when I switch branches that should be possible but not the
default behaviour. Is anything like that possible? Are there
configuration options for this?