when I do 'darcs unrecord', the corresponding *.gz file in _darcs/patches
doesn't get removed. This seems to contradict the documentation, saying "The
unrecorded patch however is actually removed from your repository".

On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 02:54:42AM +0000, Misha Aizatulin wrote:
> when I do 'darcs unrecord', the corresponding *.gz file in _darcs/patches
> doesn't get removed. This seems to contradict the documentation, saying "The
> unrecorded patch however is actually removed from your repository".

I think there is already a feature request somewhere in the bug
tracker for a --clean flag to Optimize to remove unused patch
files.

But they currently serve two purposes (that I can think of). If
a patch is unpulled and then pulled back again, the .gz file is
(some times) reused, which is good if the file is actually a
hard link. It's a common case with darcs to Get a temp repo
(this creates hard links) and do repeated Unpull / Pull there to
go to various previous versions of the repos contents. And the
left .gz files can also be used to examine and possibly patch
together a broken repo.

Note that Unrecord / Unpull / Obliterate do removes the
reference to the .gz file from the inventory, and the
reference's _position_ in the inventory is a vital part of the
patch's information, so the patch _is_ indeed lost.

One way to get a "clean" repo is to Get it and replace the old
one, as Get doesn't copy / link unreferenced .gz files.