When doing a darcs pull -a, I very often see the message "Defining 
environment variables", while I am waiting for Darcs to work. I never 
understood what this was about, as a user.

Florent proposed a patch to replace this message by a message mentioning 
set of patch calculation: http://bugs.darcs.net/patch416

If I understand correctly, this was resolved by patch416 being applied 
in 2.8.0 HEAD (which we can call informally darcs 2.7 if we want).

Note that it's a sign that we need to do something more intelligent with 
our progress reporting framework, because 'defining environment 
variables' really was the right thing to say.  

But if I understand Florent correctly, it's possible that darcs needed 
to do to define environment variables may be some huge thing that 
happens through laziness.

(I have a note to myself to post a message to darcs-users about this)

Eric Kow <bugs@darcs.net> writes:

> Note that it's a sign that we need to do something more intelligent with 
> our progress reporting framework, because 'defining environment 
> variables' really was the right thing to say.  

It could also simply be that something after that step, something runs
after that, takes a long time and does not have any progress
info. IIUIC, anyway. Whatever the reason, the user experience is awful
in the end.

Yours,
   Petr.