avoiding scans of whole directory tree

[Jamie Webb]

On 2008-05-28 15:13:18 Adrian Buehlmann wrote:
> On 28.05.2008 14:22, Jamie Webb wrote:
> > I'm talking about a slightly different thing. In the absence of
> > inotify, 'hg edit' might help if the manifest is truly huge. But hg
> > is worse than that: it slows right down if the workspace is large,
> > even if the manifest is small.
> 
> So, your use case is a large tree inside the working dir, of which
> you want to track only a small number of files?
> 
> And .hgignore doesn't help for this?

Ignoring '.*' does indeed appear to work. But, why isn't it the
default? That is, for 'hg commit', why does it bother looking at files
that are not being tracked?

Clearly .hgignore is needed for 'hg status' and recursive 'hg add', but
shouldn't other commands just be looking at the manifest?

/J