In the HintsAndTips section of the darcs documentation the following method of
removing a directory is described:

find directory_in_question -depth | xargs darcs remove

This method won't work however if the directory contains at least one unmanaged
file - darcs fails and stops when it sees the first such file.

I updated the wiki to recommend an alternative:

darcs query manifest | grep directory_in_question | xargs darcs remove

I consider this wishlist item resolved now, but someone else is welcome to
re-open it.

When I tried the new method, I got 

  Waiting for lock <reponame>/_darcs/lock

This can of course be solved by writing into an intermediate file, but then it
becomes an ugly two-liner :)

I don't think I can get my repo to trigger this, but maybe it is too small. 

Developers: Does "darcs query manifest" need to lock the repository?

On Fri, Jan 11, 2008 at 02:39:10PM -0000, Mark Stosberg wrote:
> I don't think I can get my repo to trigger this, but maybe it is too small. 
> 
> Developers: Does "darcs query manifest" need to lock the repository?

Assuming I'm right that query manifest is a synonymn for show files (we
should cut down the rate of synonymn creation), then no, it doesn't lock
the repository.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University

> Assuming I'm right that query manifest is a synonymn for show files (we
> should cut down the rate of synonymn creation), then no, it doesn't lock
> the repository.

query manifest is indeed a synonym for show files (the preferred way
of saying it)

the hope was that we would get our renames done in one big upheaval
instead of trickling them out

this is why we have the notion of hidden commands (e.g. query is
hidden).  We want to actively encourage people to say things the new
way.  We were always at war with Eurasia.

I'm again considering this resolved, since two developers confirmed that the
lock issue reported shouldn't be related to the recommended syntax posted on the
wiki as a solution.