Git on Windows: Why I suddenly have untracked directory that used to be tracked?

Question

When i hit 'git status', it shows 2 folders that contains files that are tracked long time ago:

$ git status
# On branch master
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#       src/UI/Views/Shared/EditorTemplates/
#       src/Web/helpers/

nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

Git GUI shows nothing as expected.

Using portablegit 1.7.1, but tried 1.7.0.2 - same results.

What can cause that?

---

$ cat .gitignore
.nu/*
lib/*
*~
*.swp
*.swo
*_ReSharper*
doc/*
RAPLM.suo
RAPLM.5.1.ReSharper.user
src/*/bin/*
src/*/obj/*
src/*/Debug/*
src/*/Release/*
src/Domain/unused

---

@Charles Bailey

lapsaarn@WW021198 /d/work/asdf (master)
$ git status
# On branch master
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#       src/UI/Views/Shared/EditorTemplates/
#       src/Web/helpers/
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

lapsaarn@WW021198 /d/work/asdf (master)
$ git add src/Web/helpers/

lapsaarn@WW021198 /d/work/asdf (master)
$ git add src/Web/helpers/*

lapsaarn@WW021198 /d/work/asdf (master)
$ git status
# On branch master
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
#
#       src/UI/Views/Shared/EditorTemplates/
#       src/Web/helpers/
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

lapsaarn@WW021198 /d/work/asdf (master)
$

---

@Charles

$ git ls-tree -r HEAD | grep -i helpers
100644 blob 843de27f850308786140a7c09f67b5ef99184630 src/web/helpers/HtmlHelperExtensions.cs

Answer 1

Charles Bailey correctly diagnosed the problem in the comments: "git add" on a case insensitive Os.

It is linked to issue 286 of msysgit: "Case Sensitity of Directory Names", and the issue remains (again, for directories) even if you set core.ignorecase to true.

When you add "src\Web" (with a capital 'W'), it won't add anything if your index already contains "src\web" (lowercase 'w').

A patch was proposed but rejected:

The folder seems to be listed as untracked because directory_exists_in_index() tries to compare the old name to the new name, and ending up not finding a match for the new folder (even though the file inside it remains tracked!).
A very rude patch (inlined below) was written to try to work around the issue.
Now... for my minimal case, this works - the directory is no longer listed as untracked. But I strongly expect this to be a BROKEN patch for at least the following reason: Case insensitive comparison should break binary searching, as the casing should return the wrong position if I had more files in the index.

 dir.c |    2 +-
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

diff --git a/dir.c b/dir.c
index e05b850..c55a15c 100644
--- a/dir.c
+++ b/dir.c
@@ -444,7 +444,7 @@ static enum exist_status directory_exists_in_index(const char 
*dirname, int len)
                struct cache_entry *ce = active_cache[pos++];
                unsigned char endchar;

-               if (strncmp(ce->name, dirname, len))
+               if (strnicmp(ce->name, dirname, len))
                        break;
                endchar = ce->name[len];
                if (endchar > '/')
--
1.6.4.msysgit.0.2.gcb017.dirty

---

So you need to:

• change your 'Web' into 'web' in your working directory (filesystem)
• OR change your 'web' into 'Web' in the index (git mv src/web src/Web) in your index.