This is another umbrella bug pointing to all the the evidence we have
that Darcs is too much of a pain to install (eg. on niche platforms),
and strategies for mitigating this.

Things we have so far:

* Boutique VC in boutique language raises bar for contribution (Tahoe):
http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1226
* Darcs takes forever to install
https://trac.macports.org/ticket/26582
* Request to port GHC to OpenBSD/Sparc
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3511

Note sure what the right action to take is.  Waiting passively for
Someone Else to resolve these issues for us isn't really the best thing.

Perhaps we can provide mitigation help, or actually take a more active
role in these communities (doing so strategically to avoid distraction)

For now, I'm just collecting tickets

See issue1972 for mitigation

Now that we have our own repo hosting page (hub.darcs.net based on
darcsden) we can mitigate this problem. I can see 3 approaches:

* Since the "zip export" patch (
<http://hub.darcs.net/darcs/darcs-screened/patch/20140516190946-5ef8f>
), we can a "Download ZIP" button to the repository pages of
hub.darcs.net to grab the latest working copy.

* Since the marksfile support for fast-export which is now part of darcs
itself, we can maintain (read-only) git mirrors of darcs repositories.

* We could embed some javascript code in hub.darcs.net, that grabs the
pristine root hash of any repository and enables the user to download
the current working copy of some repository. (Is this realizable in
javascript?). This would have the advantage of not requiring extra space
on the server side.

(Manual duplication for darcs-devel)

Now that we have our own repo hosting page (hub.darcs.net based on
darcsden) we can mitigate this problem. I can see 3 approaches:

* Since the "zip export" patch (
<http://hub.darcs.net/darcs/darcs-screened/patch/20140516190946-5ef8f>
), we can a "Download ZIP" button to the repository pages of
hub.darcs.net to grab the latest working copy.

* Since the marksfile support for fast-export which is now part of darcs
itself, we can maintain (read-only) git mirrors of darcs repositories.

* We could embed some javascript code in hub.darcs.net, that grabs the
pristine root hash of any repository and enables the user to download
the current working copy of some repository. (Is this realizable in
javascript?). This would have the advantage of not requiring extra space
on the server side.