3AtÜ wrote
Something that I get completly wrong?
Kind of ;-). If you do the first checkout of the devel repository, the acl.auth.php, local.php and users.auth.php
aren't there. You have to either run the installer (best option) or create them yourself. And here comes the important part. Newly added files aren't tracked by darcs unless you tell it so with a:
darcs add users.auth.php
That means, as long as you don't do darcs add <file> you don't have to worry about files below data/* or your configuration settings being added to the repository. In order to reduce the "risc" of messing with the data directory you could configure DokuWiki to use a data directory which is outside of the repository (that's what I do).
In terms of generall workflow there are different opinions. I work on one copy of the repository without problems. Others prefer to check out a master repo and then work on a local copy of this and push/pull from there (like your second approach). I might make sense if you happen to work on different things at the same time, but IMHO it has nothing to do with keeping the repository clean.
However, it's always a good idea to inspect patches before sending them, to avoid stuff like left over debugging code and the like.
HTH