Re: git status: small difference between stating whole repository and small subdirectory

> That being said, we do have an index extension to store the tree sha1 of
> whole directories (i.e., we populate it when we write a whole tree or
> subtree into the index from the object db, and it becomes invalidated
> when a file becomes modified). This optimization is used by things like
> "git commit" to avoid having to recreate the same sub-trees over and
> over when creating tree objects from the index. But we could also use it
> here to avoid having to even read the sub-tree objects from the object
> db.