1. Summarise the issue (what were doing, what went wrong?)
2. What behaviour were you expecting instead?

I've managed to get a repo into a strange state where "darcs whatsnew -l" shows some files that should be considered boring:

********

angel-dfly misc-pri $ darcs show repo
         Format: hashed, darcs-2
           Root: /home/falsifian/tmp/misc-pri
   PristineType: HashedPristine
          Cache: thisrepo:/home/falsifian/tmp/misc-pri, cache:/home/falsifian/.cache/darcs, repo:/home/falsifian/w/misc-pri, repo:., repo:exoco.falsifian.org:w/misc-pri
     PatchIndex: enabled, but not yet created
boringfile Pref: .boring
 Default Remote: /home/falsifian/w/misc-pri
    Num Patches: 3786
      Weak Hash: 0995a8b0f420094da2b1f0647428a74cff376482
angel-dfly misc-pri $ cat .boring
^org_mode/untracked.org$

/dist-newstyle

# LaTeX (and BibTeX) output

\.aux$
\.bbl$
\.blg$
\.log$
\.nav$
\.snm$
\.toc$

^n_attach/43/main.out$
^n_attach/43/main.pdf
^n_attach/209/slides.out$
^n_attach/209/slides.pdf$
^n_attach/209/slides-.*\.p(ng|pm)$
^n_attach/211/main.pdf$
^n_attach/304/main.pdf$
^n_attach/315/statement.pdf$
^n_attach/677/build$
^n_attach/744/main.out$
^n_attach/744/main.pdf$
^n_attach/786/main.out$
^n_attach/786/main.pdf$

^academic_scraps/2020-10-14_hybrid_product/hybrid_product.pdf$

^programming/s3d/build$
^programming/s3d/depends$

^tax/2020/ots/US_1040_out.txt$
angel-dfly misc-pri $ darcs whatsnew -l
a ./programming/s3d/src/build/
a ./programming/s3d/src/build/ttc/
a ./programming/s3d/src/build/ttc/S3D/
a ./programming/s3d/src/build/ttc/S3D/LinearAlgebra.ttc
a ./programming/s3d/src/build/ttc/S3D/LinearAlgebra.ttm

********

Maybe worth noting: there are a lot of other files under programming/s3d/src/build which are correctly ignored. I don't know what's special about LinearAlgebra.{ttc,ttm}.

I don't know how I got the repo in this state. I have saved a .tar.gz of the offending repo, and can reproduce by untarring it. Unfortunately the repo has some private data so I'd rather not share the whole thing.

If I clone the repo and then move the build directory to the new repo, the problem doesn't happen:

********

angel-dfly misc-pri $ cd ..
angel-dfly tmp $ darcs clone misc-pri misc-pri_1
Copying patches, to get lazy repository hit ctrl-C...    
Finished cloning.                                                               
angel-dfly tmp $ mv misc-pri/programming/s3d/build misc-pri_1/programming/s3d
angel-dfly tmp $ cd misc-pri_1
angel-dfly misc-pri_1 $ darcs whatsnew -l
No changes!

********

Even if I then replace _darcs with the one from the broken repo, the problem still doesn't happen:

********

angel-dfly misc-pri_1 $ rm -r _darcs
recursively remove _darcs? y
angel-dfly misc-pri_1 $ mv ../misc-pri/_darcs .
angel-dfly misc-pri_1 $ darcs whatsnew -l
No changes!
exit: 1 angel-dfly misc-pri_1 $ 

********

I don't know enough about Darcs to investigate further. This all seems pretty strange.


3. What darcs version are you using? (Try: darcs --exact-version)

darcs compiled on Aug 20 2021, at 10:34:19

Weak Hash: not available

Context:


[TAG 2.16.4
Ben Franksen <ben.franksen@online.de>**20210520120106
 Ignore-this: 6ad053de84a2b3fcd9dc62076e0fbbad24d8c25ef4a659a163cadc1832b39686aa41a2b7a12928df
] 


4. What operating system are you running?

DragonflyBSD

angel-dfly misc-pri $ uname -a
DragonFly angel-dfly.falsifian.org 6.1-DEVELOPMENT DragonFly 6.1-DEVELOPMENT #1: Wed Nov 17 00:06:35 UTC 2021     build@angel-dfly.falsifian.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/X86_64_GENERIC  x86_64

I may be wrong but it looks to me as if your build process somehow went 
wrong or was started from the wrong directory. Note the difference 
between boringfile:

^programming/s3d/build$

and output of whatsnew -l:

a ./programming/s3d/src/build/

This path does not match the boringfile regex because of the 
intermediate "src" directory. The files you moved into the clone also 
don't have the "src" directory.

You're right, I wasn't reading the output carefully enough, and indeed programming/s3d/src/build has those two rogue files LinearAlgebra.ttc and LinearAlgebra.ttm. So, PEBKAC, not a Darcs bug.