Snippet #508

Another horrible little convention that's crept into the Rails codebase: the use of .gitkeep files to allow the creation of what would otherwise be empty directories in the repository. A .gitignore file would be a better choice seeing as that at least can be populated with content to serve an actual purpose (ie. describing what should and should not be tracked in the directory). The .gitkeep file, on the other hand, does literally nothing and has no special meaning for Git despite the fact that its name misleading conveys that it somehow does.