avoiding scans of whole directory tree

[Jamie Webb]

On 2008-05-28 10:01:44 Adrian Buehlmann wrote:
> On 28.05.2008 09:52, Mohit Aron wrote:
> > On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 12:47 AM, Adrian Buehlmann
> > <adrian at cadifra.com <mailto:adrian at cadifra.com>> wrote:
> > 
> >     On 28.05.2008 09:34, Mohit Aron wrote:
> >     > Hello,
> >     >
> >     > commands like 'hg status' scan the full workspace to detect
> >     > what's changed.
> > 
> >     That's incorrect. See DirState on the wiki
> > 
> > How does that prevent a full namespace scan ? I understand that it
> > saves mercurial from actually having to read the data of all files.
> > It does need to read the metadata though - which is a killer if
> > there are lots and lots of files. Even worse if the workspace is on
> > NFS.
> 
> Why is it a "killer"?

I tried to use hg to manage '/' once. I gave up, because even 'hg
commit' scans the entire workspace, even if few files have been added.
I used git instead.

(In case you're going to try to tell me this was a bad idea, no it's
not. This is for a fairly specialised server appliance setup, where I
want to keep a very tight control of how the system changes.)

/J