very slow when only managing part of a tree

[Thomas Klausner]

Hi!

I recently tried using mercurial to track a few files I wanted to
modify locally in a big code base (tracked with CVS).

My workflow was:
cd somewhere
hg init
hg add path/to/file1
hg add path/to/file2
hg ci

The commit was very slow (probably because hg looked all over the tree
for modified files?).

Also, when I edited one of the files, "hg diff" was slow.

I can speed it up by adding every directory and file in which I am
_not_ interested into .hgignore.

I still wonder though why hg is not smart enough to only look at the
time stamps of the files it is tracking? (or perhaps additionally the
directories in the paths to the files, if necessary).

Perhaps someone can shed a light on this.

Thanks,
 Thomas