David Roundy wrote:
> Yes, I can reproduce this, and I can't think of anything you could
> do, unless you're willing to code up a special-case routine for
> darcs whatsnew -s.

If I knew Haskell, I probably would.

> I consider this a not-so-important regression, just because this
> is an extreme use case

Hmm, probably not that extreme. If darcs was written in a language like
Java rather than Haskell (don't panic, this is just a thought
experiment ;-), the source file count would probably be up by a factor
of 5 or so, maybe even more. So the slowdown could be quite significant.

Also, I think that reviewers are likely to use some largish tree as
a data point.

> with a very easy workaround: don't use --look-for-adds.

So you are saying that adding the files wouldn't be that incredibly
slow and I should just get rid of my habit of running `darcs w -ls'
before adding + recording? I'll try this -- knowing such a thing
would already be very helpful.
  Is it worth putting this in the manual? I could cook up a
documentation patch at least. Or should this be in the Wiki somewhere
once Darcs2 is out?

> I'm sorry, but optimizing this sort of extreme case just doesn't
> seem like a good use of my time.

I absolutely trust in you finding the optimal priorities for the
darcs project.

> The regression, I'm certain, came about as a result of a fix
> for a very subtle and hard-to-track-down sort of bug.

OK, knowing this also makes it easier to live with the current
state.

W o l f g a n g