It would be really useful to have a quick and dirty benchmarking script that we
can either distribute with or alongside darcs

The script would just encode some current darcs benchmarking practices: namely,
getting a repository, obliterating a 1000 patches and pulling them back.  Having
it do the best of N trials is probably a good idea too.  Automatically
summarising the results (% improvement) would be nice too.

Perhaps a good way to do it is to have it be parameterisable with two
directories (with darcs built in both) and a repository.  To avoid people having
to choose a repository, we could also distribute the GHC one as the prototypical
large-ish repository and hopefully set our sights higher one day.

Also, I think it's more important for us to have a basic version of this script
now, than a fancy one later :-)