I'm a bit concerned that the Darcs UI may be getting a bit chatty 
recently in its effort to provide helpful feedback to users.

Is there anything we can do to provide this kind of helpfulness without 
creating lots of visual noise that people end up ignoring?

patch583 (which I've decided to just abandon) proposed a keyword based 
online help mechanism (see below), as a way of providing layering 
(there's no such thing as “too much” information; only badly structured 
information)

Petr made the following nice points:

- that this probably isn't a big problem in practice
- that the familiarity of message shapes may actually be helpful for 
people (they know at a glance what've seen before and therefore what they 
can safely ignore) 
- that maybe a mechanism for suppressing unwanted messages (by adding 
something to config) may be better instead

http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2011-May/026141.html

I don't know what to do, but I'm just going to leave this ticket here in 
case the discussion comes up again.

Original
--------
% darcs get /tmp/blah
darcs failed:  Not a repository: /tmp/blah (/tmp/blah/_darcs/inventory 
does not exist)

HINT: Do you have the right URI for the repository?

      If so, check with the repository owner to see if the following 
files
      are readable:

        1. _darcs/format    - might not exist; that's OK
        2. _darcs/inventory - should exist if #1 is missing
        3. _darcs/hashed_inventory - should exist if #2 is missing

Proposed: Keyword-based Help
----------------------------
% dist/build/darcs/darcs get /tmp/blah

darcs failed:  Not a repository: /tmp/blah (/tmp/blah/_darcs/inventory 
does not exist)

Do you have the right URI or path? For details, `darcs help not-a-repo`