'hg diff' writing temp files to CWD

[Jens Alfke]

On 24 Sep '07, at 11:00 PM, I wrote:

> The "hg diff" subcommand seems to use the current working directory  
> as  a location for temporary files. This results in [momentary]  
> filesystem  changes in the repository.

It's actually not the CWD, it's always the root of the repo. So I  
can't work around this by changing the CWD before issuing "hg diff -- 
repository".

And when the filesystem tells my app that the root dir has changed, it  
issues "hg status" on that dir, which means hg has to scan the entire  
directory tree. That gets expensive for large repos. Is there a "non- 
recursive" option to "hg status" that will skip subdirectories, as  
there is in SVN?

--Jens