When I do something like:

darcs get --verbose --to-match "hash  
20050421043628-8498e-6fac25ad05cf9a870c0eee854fb4ff386a271268" /home/ 
Repos/unstable/ /home/andrewm/test

at the "Writing working directory" stage darcs takes many minutes and  
does several GB of IO... yet:

  zcat /home/Repos/unstable/_darcs/patches/ 
20050421043628-8498e-6fac25ad05cf9a870c0eee854fb4ff386a271268.gz | wc
   27731  105819  771252

the patch is only 771kB, and consists entirely of 131 new files.  The  
target repository is empty to start with, the source repository  
contains 282 patches totalling 255MB gzipped.

Andrew

Andrew,

Is there a possibility you could test again with a darcs-2 pre-release binary by
first converting the source repo to the "darc2" format? ("darcs convert old new"
is all it takes.) ? 

There are binaries for the Darcs 2 prelease built for Mac and Linux and
available here:

http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/DarcsTwo
   
    Mark

I consider this resolved-in-unstable after doing my own testing tonight. I
tested with the darcs-unstable repo (in --darcs-2 format), copying about 5,000
patches and 30M of total data. This went rather quickly. (< 1 min).