> You never said you wanted to add the files to your repository.
> That would be another question.  I couldn't say how darcs will behave
> with this many files in the repository.  Certainly adding them will
> be painful.

It wasn't that bad the last time I did so with darcs1. Although, IIRC, I 
took a mental note not to add the whole tree at once, but to proceed
one subdirectory at a time.

Just to give you an idea what I am trying to do here: We have this largish
Java project that is under SVN. When I am working on some complex new feature,
I often don't want to commit my wild experiments to the SVN repository.
  But I am hooked on Revision Control and terribly afraid of losing something
that worked at one time.
  Enter darcs. I `darcs init', adjust the boring file (this is where I use
`whatsnew -ls' a lot), then add everything and record.
  Then I work, comitting to darcs every now and then, and only comitting to
the central SVN repo once I think a (sub-)feature makes sense. When I am done
and everything is committed to SVN, I can simply remove the whole _darcs
directory.

This is not the standard darcs user story, but I am convinced that there are
others working the same way. It is sort of messy at times, because I get lots
of upstream changes in between, but I find darcs very useful for this
approach.

For the time being, I'll stick with darcs1 for this sort of thing.