Re:

2009/5/7 Bevan Watkiss [off-list ref]:

It's the looking for local changes I'm trying to avoid.  Doing a reset still
goes over the tree, which isn't helpful.

The stat(2) is slow? Then try setting core.ignoreStat (see manpage
of git config) to true: git config core.ignorestat true
and read below.

Basically I have a copy of my tree where only git can write to it, so I know
the files are right.  The NAS box I have the tree on is slow, so reading the
tree adds about 10 minutes to the process when I only want to update a few
files.

Try "git checkout origin/master". It uses index and shouldn't checkout files
which are uptodate with the index. And actually, git merge should fast-forward,
in your case and will update just the changed files...

Of course, you can always compare HEAD and origin/master, and resolve
the changes yourself (see git diff -z --name-status), but it is unlikely to be
any faster.