[Question] Poll on Git status

[cyn0]

HI,
We are using Git Jupyterlab extension on a directory mounted by S3-fuse. Poll on status api triggers git diff --numstat -z --cached 4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904 exec which in triggers burst of s3 API requests.

Question:
Why we do need to compare current stage with empty tree (from using --cached 4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904) to render the diff in the extension UI? I modified the plugin to use git diff --numstat -z (which doesnt trigger too many S3 requests) and I see that same information in the extension as before. I am interested in use-cases that would require us to compare current stage with empty tree.

Thanks a lot for your help in advance!

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[fcollonval]

@cyn0 This command is executed to determine if a file is binary or not. We are comparing to an empty tree to be able to get the information what ever the current git status of a file (typically if there is no diff it will not be possible to get that information).

Although in that precise case it indeed does not make sense to look for unchanged files.

As that information is not transient (there is a few chance a file with a given path will switch from textual to binary type), the best path seems to use _is_binary when polling the status and add a async cache on that method.

Feel free to start a PR and I will help you getting it through.