Creating or ignoring missing empty directories in Eclipse

I recently moved a project from SVN to Git.

Now my Eclipse complains that the directory src/main/resources is missing.

The directory was an empty directory in SVN, but Git seems to ignore empty directories entirely.

Can I tell Eclipse to

• either create the directory when checking out the project
• or ignore the "error" completely

?

> I don't want to put fake files into a directory. I want to solve the problem on the Eclipse side

You can tell Eclipse to ignore certain problems.

• Go to Window -> Preferences -> Validation.
• In the Validation page, you can enable or disable individual validators, set the severity of validation messages, and customize other validation behavior.
  Find the validator that's causing the issue and disable it or adjust its settings as necessary.

But if there is no matching validator, then... the solution is on Git side.

Git provides a mechanism called gitattributes that can be used to specify custom actions upon checkout and other events.
The filter attribute allows you to define a pair of "smudge" and "clean" scripts. The smudge script is run on checkout, and the clean script is run when files are staged (i.e., added to the index).

In your case, you could create a smudge script that creates the directory you need.

• Start with defining a filter in your repository's .git/config file:

  [filter "createDir"]
      smudge = 'mkdir -p src/main/resources && cat'
      clean = cat
  

  This sets up a filter named "createDir". The smudge command creates the src/main/resources directory (if it doesn't exist already) and then passes the file content through cat unmodified. The clean command just passes the file content through unchanged.

• Then Apply the filter to a known file of your repository in your .gitattributes file (for instance README.md if you have one):

  README.md filter=createDir
  

  This applies the "createDir" filter to your file README.md.

Since it involves the local Git config, this process needs to be activated by the developer:

git config --local filter.createDir.smudge 'mkdir -p src/main/resources && cat'
git config --local filter.createDir.clean cat

git restore --source=HEAD .

You can generally hack Git into doing anything you want, and so it is here, but it looks like you're trying to use Git as a deployment server, which it is not (in much the same way as Blender is tantalizingly close to a CAD program, the focus is just wrong enough that moving that direction would hurt its main business).

The hack for getting Git to create an empty directory is to tell it there's supposed to be a separate work tree there.

z8=00000000
git update-index --add --cacheinfo 160000,$z8$z8$z8${z8}00000001,path/to/empty/dir

and then when you check the committed version of that out Git will make an empty directory there. Have I used the word "hack" enough? The right way to do this is to have a setup script, I have a "setup" target in my makefiles and all the other targets eventually depend on that.

edit: to find all empty directories, find -empty.

find -type d -name .git -prune -o -type d -empty -exec git update-index etc {} \;

or -exec whatever you want to do with them.