It would be nice if darcs dist allowed the creation of tarballs
elsewhere.  The current behavior is just broken; it creates a gzipped
file containing an error message from tar. Example:
darcs dist -d ../foo
Created dist as ../foo.tar.gz

This exits successfully , but the supposed tar file contains
tar: foo: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
(binary junk)
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors

I know this isn't the currently intended use, thanks to help:
-d DISTNAME  --dist-name=DISTNAME  name of version
but the feature would be nice, or at least the error handled.

Resolved in darcs 1.0.9 with

Thu Oct 26 05:55:35 CEST 2006  Wim Lewis <wiml@hhhh.org>
  * Tidy filenames before invoking tar 
  Only use the last path component of --dist-name for the distribution
  name; the rest is still used when creating the final tar file. (issue323)

Thanks!