alt Hacker NewsI know you meant well but...
"It deletes empty folders" and "Let me know if this is a problem for you"
NEVER DO THAT. I know you meant well, but the first rule of any program is to NEVER automatically delete something without informing the user. NEVER. Users keep empty folders for structure, reminders, or placeholders because software will dump files into it later when it's run. If it was there when they zipped it up, it should be there when they unzip it. Otherwise they'll check the before and after and it will show some folders missing, create confusion, and the user will run off trying to find out if anything else is missing.
Example: A user zips up a program. Some programs are coded to look for a folder and dump files into it, if the folder is missing the program will fail. I've had that occasionally over the years. Not all programs will recreate a missing folder.
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Yeah that probably should just be an option. Basically the default is to least mangle the zip file. Where the most extreme is turned on by flags. One of those could be 'remove empty folders'.
One thing I dislike about git is that it really does not support empty folders well. Even though they might make sense lot of time. Either now or for future. There is decent reasons to have empty folders.