Hello,

while debugging encoding problems in darcs, I replaced the definition of
Printer.hPrintPrintable with the following code (which outputs pure
ASCII and explicitely shows non-ASCII character codes and such):

    hPrintPrintable h (S str)            = hPutStr h ("String:\n" ++ show str ++ "\n")
    hPrintPrintable h (PS byteStr)       = hPutStr h ("ByteString:\n" ++ show (B.unpack byteStr) ++ "\n")
    hPrintPrintable h (Both str byteStr) = hPrintPrintable h (S str) >> hPrintPrintable h (PS byteStr)

I then ran darcs changes on a small repository. This revealed an
interesting phenomenon: Every “Printable” that hPrintPrintable was
called with seemed to consist of only a single character (sometimes
represented by S, sometimes by Both). So hPrintPrintable is obviously
called once per character, which doesn’t seem sensible.

Best wishes,
Wolfgang

This issue is supposedly resolved by this patch:

"Resolve issue 2021: make escaping not split strings too much"