non-recursive status of a directory?

[Mark Hammond]

Not wanting to flog a dead horse, but while it seems to be still breathing a
little :)

> > On my most active branch with a 650MB working tree of 20,000 files in
> > 3,600 folders I get 3 seconds on my NTFS formatted 7200rpm laptop
> > hard-drive under WinXP if the folder is already cached - if it's not
> > cached (or worse, python and bzr aren't yet cached) the time is > 10
> > seconds.
> >
> > If delays to get any current icons are always 2+ seconds in explorer
> > then I think that's too long.  Of course if the system is smart
> enough
> > to keep bzr and python files in cache and keep and maintain status
> > information in memory for a reasonable period after a first peek then
> > perhaps this is less of a concern.
> 
> But if it takes 10 seconds to figure it out, thats how long it takes.

But that is true for svn too - it might be 30 seconds+ in that case, but the
concept remains the same.  I suspect I'm missing your point...

> This is a boolean: either we know the answer, or we don't. And in the
> common case we have to examine most of the entire tree (for any search
> order we choose, 50% of the time the changed file will be in the last
> half of the search).
> 
> We can't put 'unchanged' as a detail on a folder until we know it is,
> or users may happily delete an altered folder *thinking it is
> unaltered*.

This too seems true of any Tortoise - SVN, BZR, etc.  It seems to me that
TSVN has the relevant experience to let us know what actually works for
users in situations like this.  TSVN has many icon related user-preferences,
and while some seem obscure to me, I accept that enough TSVN users found
them useful enough to warrant their current implementation.

I'm more than happy to discuss any "VCS agnostic" feature of TSVN that
people think they haven't got right - but I think using TSVN as a reference
for such discussions has more value than an empty slate.  My 2 line
summaries of certain TSVN features try to be brief enough to get a point
across rather than verbose enough to fully describe it (it doesn't seem
worthwhile to try and fully describe something which can easily be seen for
itself.)
 
Cheers,

Mark