Simon and David,

Just reporting that I have retrieved the tarball and tried the darcs pull on
Linux using darcs 2.  It took about 20 minutes, but it succeeded.  So I could
not reproduce it here :-/ 

Off-topic: performance
======================
I realise this is not terribly relevant, but re: timing, it spent a minute after
reading the inventory, spent about 6 minutes fetching patches, stopped a while,
fetched more patches for another 22 minutes, did a little bit of work and
successfully applied.  

(One puzzling thing is that I tried this twice, and the first time, I could have
sworn it only took about 10 minutes or so, whereas the second time took twice as
long)

That's 82% of the time spent recuperating patches (or more; I re-did the test
using a local pull, and it only took about 4 minutes).  For the record, I
counted something like 1700 patches in the remote inventory and 6 in the local
one.  Hopefully the pipelining work will improve this.  I haven't had a chance
to try it.

For other people doing triage on this kind of thing, the new --debug-verbose
--timings switches in darcs 2 are quite handy.