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Date: Thu, 01 Feb 2001 10:29:02 -0600
From: Ken Wood <kwood@i2.com>
Organization: APD/TradeMatrix/Two I2 Place
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To: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: Re: [Bug 329] New - Jar file has redundant subdirectories BugRat
 Report#595
References: <200102010945.BAA08636@nagoya-a.betaversion.org>
 <3A79649E.5B7278D@i2.com> <3A797FA2.9881B916@netbeans.com>
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It makes sense if you have a few empty directories.
But if you have a large directory tree with
many files, and many (i.e 50 to 100) empty
directories, explictly listing every directory
to force it to be included would be a nightmare.

If you check the archives, you'll find there
was a time that the zip task did NOT pick up
empty directories, and a number of people
lobbied for the change in behavior. That
change was made, now we all depend on it.
If it is removed, it will set us all
back a notch or two.

Without boring you with details, this
issue was sufficiently important to us
that we did not even consider adopting ant
until the problem was resolved. So obviously,
we don't want to see this go away. And, obivously
for maintenance reasons, we don't want to have
to explictly spell out every empty directory
that should be included.

What makes more sense to me, if avoiding empty
directories is a big issue for others, is to
have a property to control this. So just as
we can say "compressed=on" or 'compressed=off',
we could say "include_empty=on" or 'include_empty=off',
with include_empty=on the default.

Jesse Glick wrote:
> 
> Ken Wood wrote:
> > There are those of us who need these empty directories
> > because they are place holders for things to come at
> > product install time. So, we need to preserve
> > this behavior, especially in zip files, one way or another.
> 
> IMHO: <zip> etc. should create directories for files it is adding, and
> empty directories only where explicitly mentioned, e.g.:
> 
> <zip basedir="a">
>   <include name="x/"/>
> </zip>
> 
> would be the normal case and would give:
> 
> a/x/
> a/x/foo
> a/x/bar
> 
> whereas:
> 
> <zip basedir="a">
>   <include name="x/"/>
>   <include name="y"/> <!-- no trailing slash! -->
>   <include name="z"/>
> </zip>
> 
> would mean you explicitly wanted the empty dirs and give:
> 
> a/x/
> a/x/foo
> a/x/bar
> a/y/
> a/z/
> 
> Does that make sense? Hopefully this would match behavior of
> getIncludedFiles() + getIncludedDirectories().
>