So first, I do a ”darcs initialize” — all well.

Now I want to see what the status of the repository is — what files darcs doesn’t know about yet (all, at this time), what files should be added (again, all) and so on. All SCM’s that I know of (svn, hg, bzr) typically have a nice ”status” command, specifically for this purpoes. But in darcs? No. Nothing of the sort.

//After// I get on with adding all the files, I want to see the status again — what are the pending changes and so on. So I do a ”darcs whatsnew” — well guess what, its default behavior is to **output ALL changes** onto the screen. In my case, this was a boatload of HTML, CSS and Javascript code. Why?! There //is// a ”-s” option that gives the summary output, but why isn’t this the default behavior? Imagine if I had done this on the kernel source tree?

There were several other minor nit-picks. All in all, I left with a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe I didn’t know the right commands. But I tried to read up the manual and wiki before I started, and didn’t find what I needed there. I don’t want to be biased against darcs, so if you can help me out in any way, do let me know!