In a clean GHC repository (downloadable from
http://darcs.haskell.org/ghc-HEAD-2007-12-16-ghc-corelibs-testsuite.tar.bz2), I did:

darcs pull -a --match "before 2008-03-24"

darcs ran for twenty minutes, then spit out:

**********************
darcs: Invalid --match pattern 'before 2008-03-24'.
    "match" (line 1, column 1):
    unexpected "b"
    expecting match rule

Perhaps darcs could check the syntax of the pattern before getting patches, so
that the user could fix their error without waiting twenty minutes for patches
to download.

darcs 1.0.9rc1, btw

I'm pushing a fix for this.  When it arrives, could you check that it actually
works, Tim?  Thanks for the bug report!

David

Never mind with testing this, Tim (unless you'd like to, which would always be
appreciated).  I noticed that you were reporting on darcs 1.0.9rc1, and figured
you'd probably rather not bother compiling the latest darcs-unstable, so I wrote
up a nice little test script for this problem.

Okay, looks like our automatic closing of bugs is acting up again.  :(

Thanks for the fix. You're right that I would prefer not to get involved in
compiling the latest darcs at this precise moment, but whenever I get around to
upgrading (which might be never), I'll yell if it doesn't work :-)