From: Markus Fischer <markus@...>
Date: 2011-03-03T09:15:00+09:00
Subject: Finding all empty directories in a subversion checkout

Hi,

I tried to write a script to find all empty directories in a subversion
checkout. In my view there were two main problems to solve:

1) empty directories also contain .svn control directories

2) directories containing only further empty directories should be
detected as such too.

I came up with https://gist.github.com/852051 and on my simple tests so
far it worked well. I'd like to get feedback on the code and how I used
certain idioms, or rather, miss-used certain idioms or areas where I can
improve it "the ruby way".

For example, I'm not really fond of the big case statement in the fourth
loop block:

    dirs_count[dir] =
        Dir.entries(dir).collect { |e|
            case e
            when '.svn'
                nil
            when '.'
                nil
            when '..'
                nil
            else
                e
            end
        }.compact.count

Seems pretty redundant to me, in other languages I'd have written e.g.

switch(e) {
  case '.svn':
  case '.':
  case '..':
    return nil;
  default:
    return e;
}

But I'm not sure how to apply that in ruby and I also think that these
could be improved anyway.

I'm sure a trained mind can spot other areas for improvement, I'm glad
for any suggestions!

thanks,
- Markus