After scratching my head a bit with this issue, I finally found what's going
on here, seems that what is causing all the  mess is the
_dacrs/prefs/sources file and the fact that they are tried before the
repository we are pulling (even if local),  so a work around which could
work is checking first if the repo we are pulling is local, and then adding
it to the sources file, also we have to notice that It tries from top to
bottom, so, why we don't keep the sources files sorted ?  keeping locals
first and so on. (I'm still asking if   this would break something ?  )

I used the test cases Eric put before and put the R repo in a server,
(trying to make it look to the original report).

I'm attaching two files, in the file "log", you can see how it goes to the
server looking for the missing patches/inventories :(.. then I manually
wrote down in the sources file the repo S, and you can see that the result
is different when trying to pull (file "log10") ,  it  looks like this :

abuiles@abuiles-laptop:~/linkProg/gsoc2010/testRepo$ cat
T/_darcs/prefs/sources
cache:/home/abuiles/.darcs/cache
thisrepo:/media/my-disk/stuff/adolfo/programacion/gsoc2010/testRepo/T
repo:/media/my-disk/stuff/adolfo/programacion/gsoc2010/testRepo/S
repo:acadavid@lizarus.com:R

Attachments

• log
• log10
• unnamed

This was meant to be part of issue1503.  I've added the messages and
attachments there accordingly.