determine if the tree is dirty

Hi

As part of a python script I need to determine if a tree has any uncommitted changes, so far I am been using:

  # determine tree status
  status_cmd = 'git status'
  status_output = run_external_command(status_cmd,
honour_ret_code=False)[1].strip()
  if status_output.endswith('no changes added to commit (use "git add"
and/or "git commit -a")'):
    git_status = 'UNCLEAN: Some modifications not committed'
  else:
    git_status = 'CLEAN: All modifications committed'

but I feel that this relies to heavily on the porcelain and that there should be a better way to accomplish this without relying on parsing the output of git-status.

Does anyone know of a better way to accomplish this?

Cheers

Adam