So I was today running a little shell script to recurse through ~/bin and do a
'darcs pull' in each of my many local repos (~360), and I noticed a number of
them had local patches. But it were tedious indeed to watch the output and
collect the list of repos to deal with manually.

So the obvious approach to take would be to simply pipe through grep and tell it
to watch for "We have the following new (to them) patches:". Except then I
noticed that Darcs is very noisy. It prints that message regardless; it prints
both messages even if the two repos are perfectly up to date vis-a-vis each
other. twb suggested a clever method ('echo d | darcs push | ! grep "No patches
to push!"'), but it strikes me as silly to resort to such tricks when it could
be fixed by darcs simply printing less uselessness.

The behaivour is modestly annoying. It'd be nice if the code in Pull.lhs would
check if the Doc it's printing was empty before it prints the informative
message. (I would've made the change myself, but I don't understand the Reader
stuff enough to know how to check for emptiness.)

gwern,

It sounds like you are using "--verbose", when simply not using --verbose would
make "darcs pull" less noisy. Here what it does when there are no patches to pull:

$ darcs pull
Pulling from "/home/sap/alphasite"...
No remote changes to pull in!

########

That looks very reasonable to me. 

I'm marking this request as "wont-fix" for now, but if you feel strongly that
another option besides not using --verbose should be pursued, you are welcome to
respond to re-open the wishlist request.