Define new setting: "git.statusArgs.untrackedFiles"

[ajhyndman]

This PR fixes #128800

If anyone has suggestions for how I might opt into this behaviour without patching the built-in git extension, I'd love to hear that as well. Without this change, VS Code's git features are almost unusable in my team's large repository.

NOTE: With this change, when using --untracked-files=normal, the VS Code status panel will not render untracked folders. It's an interesting product question whether or how untracked folders might be communicated in this mode, but simply omitting untracked folders vastly improves my workflow now. I don't see any reason that this need be a blocking decision.

[ghost]

All CLA requirements met.

[ajhyndman]

This could also be an alternate approach to fixing #131020.

I think landing both changes would be ideal. I am more than happy to rebase this change for compatibility, if there's interest.

[ajhyndman]

I have rebased this for compatibility with the recently landed change, #131030.

[lszomoru]

@ajhyndman, thank you very much for rebasing this pull request. I have looked at both pull requests in this area and I have decided to merge #131030 as that adds support for -uno and -uall. Is there a valid scenario in which we would like to support -unormal?

[ajhyndman]

@lszomoru I work with an oversized monorepo in my day job. I frequently patch the vscode git extension to set the status arg to -unormal.

This is definitely still not an ideal workflow, but git status -unormal runs in about 1 second, compared to -uall which can take closer to 20 seconds. A 20 second delay on feedback makes the VS Code git extension mostly unusable. -uno lets me work again, but I have to worry about forgetting untracked files. With -unormal, VS Code can still let me know about most of the untracked files in my repository while keeping performance manageable.

[lszomoru]

@ajhyndman, thank you very much for getting back to me on this. I think that your scenario is valid, my only concern is that we do not want to lift git command arguments into VS Code settings. We currently have a setting that control untracked changes (git.untrackedChanges) so I will take a closer look at the existing values and see if that setting could be extended in order to expose an option which would result in using the -unormal argument. Will keep you posted.

[ajhyndman]

@lszomoru That makes perfect sense. I agree that this is an awkwardly low-level setting!

Do you think it would make any more sense to expose the option programmatically instead? I'd be happy to write myself a small plugin to get this functionality rather than have to manually patch the built-in git extension.

[lszomoru]

Closing this pull request in favour of #169253