Say a darcs repository was created inside a subdirectory in /home/foo
by user foo. If root pulls a patch into that repo then
_darcs/inventory will change ownership from foo to root. Now any
subsequent pull by user foo will both fail and leave the repository in
an incosistent state, because it cannot record the presence of the new
patches in _darcs/invenory (permission denied). Moreover, patches
cannot be unrecorded or unpulled, even though they have been applied.

darcs should either not change the ownership of _darcs/inventory or
make pulls atomic, ie if darcs pull fails then none of the patches are
applied and the repository is left in its initial state.

Thanks,

Mathieu Boespflug

The new --umask option might help to work around this problem.

Darcs often creates new files, so even if the inventory owner was preserved (if
possible) many other files would still be created with the wrong owner. And
darcs could not change the file owner uless it was suid, and _that_ would be a
really bad idea. It's better to set the group sticky bit on shared repos and use
the --umask option to keep files group writable.

A more atomic pull (and others) is under development.

David, 

Would this be addressed by the atomicity of the new hashed or darcs-2 formats? 

  Mark

Yes, this is addressed by the atomicity of the darcs-2 and hashed formats.