Re: Branches & directories

[Kyle Moffett <kyle@moffetthome.net>]

On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 22:13, Hilco Wijbenga <hilco.wijbenga@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for sticking it out. :-) That all makes sense. I think it's all
> pretty clear now.

It's worth mentioning that in most cases you DON'T want to delete untracked and
ignored files when switching branches.

For example, when I'm doing kernel development, I will frequently do this:

$ git checkout -b my-new-feature origin/master
[...hack hack hack...]
$ make -j16 && make install && reboot
[...find unrelated bug...]
$ git checkout -b my-new-bugfix origin/master
[...fix the bug...]
$ make -j16 && make install && reboot
$ git commit -m 'I fixed this bug'
$ git checkout my-new-feature
$ git rebase my-new-bugfix
$ make -j16 && make install && reboot

To avoid wasting time I don't want to completely rebuild the kernel each
and every time I switch branches, I just want to rebuild the files that
changed when I switched.  The way GIT works lets me do that quite
easily, and the kernel Makefiles detect the changed files and rebuild
the minimum amount necessary.

GIT's behavior when you switch between branches is effectively the
same as applying a patch generated by diffing between the two
branches.  Any files which would not be changed are left alone, their
timestamps completely unchanged.

It sounds like Eclipse is simply not detecting changes to your working
tree by outside programs, and as a result it's not rebuilding files and
indexes the way that it should.

Obviously the easiest way to work around that issue is "git clean",
which has options to select all untracked files or just ignored ones.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett