1. Summarise the issue (what were doing, what went wrong?)

franksen@aragon:~/ctl/tmp/a:b > darcs get
/opt/repositories/controls/darcs/epics/ioc/MLS-Controls/base-3-14 mls
--tag=GP-2009-07-07T1042
cp: cannot stat
`/srv/projects/ctl/franksen/tmp/a:b/mls//_darcs/prefs/sources': No such
file or directory
cp: cannot stat
`/srv/projects/ctl/franksen/tmp/a:b/mls//_darcs/prefs/sources': No such
file or directory
Copying patches, to get lazy repository hit ctrl-C...
Unapplying 682 patches                                                 
     
WARNING: Doing a one-time conversion of pristine format.          
This may take a while. The new format is backwards-compatible.

darcs failed:  error opening
_darcs/pristine.hashed/c0eecb5cd0c6113bea82fa6244a52c8a0f2c179101c99e5750bb8527829021fe


However, if I do the same in ~/ctl/tmp, it works:

franksen@aragon:~/ctl/tmp > darcs get
/opt/repositories/controls/darcs/epics/ioc/MLS-Controls/base-3-14 mls
--tag=GP-2009-07-07T1042
Copying patches, to get lazy repository hit ctrl-C...
Unapplying 682 patches                                                 
     
Finished getting.

2. What behaviour were you expecting instead?

I expect darcs to work even if my current working directory contains
colons or other unusual characters.

3. What darcs version are you using? (Try: darcs --exact-version)

darcs-2.8.0

4. What operating system are you running?

Linux (32bit)

Additional remarks:

(1) I can reproduce the error messages ('cannot stat ...') with a small
test repo and a simple 'darcs get <repo>', but not the final 'darcs
failed:  error opening ...'.

(2) The final failure does not happen if the --tag=GP-2009-07-07T1042 is
omitted.

(3) I wonder why I get the

WARNING: Doing a one-time conversion of pristine format.

Doing

darcs optimize --pristine
darcs optimize --upgrade

in the source repo does not make these warnings go away.

> (3) I wonder why I get the
> 
> WARNING: Doing a one-time conversion of pristine format.

This is due to some poor exception catching, which I seem to recall
assumes that any failure must be due to being an old format repo. That
issue is http://bugs.darcs.net/issue2134, I don't quite remember what is
required to fix it though.

I can't reproduce the bug with current darcs HEAD version. Probably
because exception catching has been improved since the time this ticket
was open.

Marking as resolved.