Comment by faho

You mean actually reading dirstate[0] or just the branch/bookmark files?

We also do the latter, but dirstate format isn't easily readable just with shell builtins (lots of fixed-length fields with NUL-byte padding, also we don't even have a `stat` builtin and the external program isn't a thing on macOS AFAIK), so we still fire up `hg status` for that - but only after we decide that there is a hg repo.

[0]:https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/DirState