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This is not an uncommon behavior in source code control systems, e.g. both Perforce and Mercurial behave like Git too.

E.g. see https://portal.perforce.com/s/article/3447 for Perforce.

Yet, it's wrong.

Just the fact that people keep using placeholder files should be enough to convince anybody. But if you want to use git for software development, well, almost all development conventions mandate directory intentionally kept empty or to exist before their contents exist. I've never seen anybody decide on something that doesn't.

Object stores like S3 work similarly, the entire path is to an object, and unless there is data at a path, the path doesn't exist. And you don't need to create the prefix before storing something with that prefix. That the tooling abstracts that a way to make it look more like a filesystem is a layer on top.

> almost all development conventions mandate directory intentionally kept empty or to exist before their contents exist

Never heard about this, nor can I imagine what purpose it could serve.

As an aside, aren't folders in *nix also files ? So how did this happen with git, written by Linus ??

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