Hi David, 

The repository is in darcs1 format, yes.
> How many patches are in it?
2112

> What is the total size of _darcs/patches (e.g. `du -sh _darcs/patches`)?
619M

> What's the total size of the repository contents (e.g. du -sh _darcs/pristine)?
342M

> How much memory and swap do you have? Similarly, if you watch top, how much
memory do you see darcs using before it dies?
My machine has 4GB, but due to irritating BIOS/motherboard limitation, I can
only see 3.2GB.  At the time I made the error report I was running 32bit Ubuntu
Gutsy.  My machine was configured with 4GB swap.  Using top, darcs's resident
set was about 2.7GB, and it died trying to allocate another ~700MB.  I don't
recall the size of the non-resident set, but I expect that the 700MB allocation
attempt would have surpassed the 4GB address space for 32bit processes.

> Do you have many (or large) binary files in the repository?
Unfortunately, yes (358 binaries - basically all the dependencies for our
different modules).  There are about 10 3MB binaries and the rest are
progressively smaller.  There is also a single very large text file ~30MB.

I realize that putting all of those binaries under source control wasn't the
smartest thing to do - it was the result of a hasty decision, what can I say..