non-recursive status of a directory?

[Mark Hammond]

I'm looking for a way to perform a non-recursive iter_changes() or
changes_from() on a directory.  I'll try and explain my requirements: for
Tortoise, I'd like the fastest possible way to say "give me the status of
this one directory in a working tree".  I'd like to know about "missing"
items in the directory, and I'd like to know an "immediate" status of any
child directories (eg, if the directory has been added), but do *not* need a
recursive status for children of the directory; the tortoise code will
manage walking and watching subdirectories in the background in order to
keep Windows explorer both responsive and accurate.

Digging around a little, I noticed the builtin "status" command has adding a
'--no-recurse' as a TODO comment, which gives me some hope.  I dug around in
workingtree and it doesn't seem too hard to implement there, but then it was
pointed out that workingtree_4 is what I should be looking at, and that
looks a little trickier.

So I guess I've a couple of questions:

* Does my requirement make sense?
* Any ideas how I can help to move towards it?

Thanks,

Mark