How does darcs handle $EDITOR? I set it to `emacsclient', which works
well with svn, while darcs would insist starting a emacs session
everytime..  What is the problem here? 

,----[ darcs --version ]
| 1.0.9 (release)
`----

,----[ C-h v emacs-version RET ]
| emacs-version is a variable defined in `version.el'.
| Its value is "22.1.91.6"
| 
| 
| Documentation:
| Version numbers of this version of Emacs.
| 
| [back]
`----

I'm not sure what the problem is, never having used emacsclient myself.  Can you
try running with a darcs 2 prerelease and use --debug mode? This should give
more useful information about what's actually going on.

I just tried to compile darcs from source, but building ghc itself fails. 
Before further investigation, is there a Mac OS X binary build for darcs 2 ?

xwl: there are some nice GHC binary packages for MacOS X on their website.  As
for darcs-2 binaries, please have a look at
http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/CategoryBinaries#head-c14449f675f1f36c70703538d40e79f056a69bd9

These are unofficial, of course.

kowey: I've just darcs2 binary from:

  http://www.fivesquaresoftware.com/source/

and darcs2 respects $EDITOR as expected! No problem now, thanks!