notice that in this message linus says "And in that sense, I do think the two approaches can _complement_ each other"

And simmetrically, a few years later, david roundy (the original author of darcs) started working on iolaus[1] which is in fact a darcs-ish implementation on top of git.

[1] https://github.com/droundy/iolaus now abandoned I believe

I look forward to Darcs being more and more worthy for Git to steal ideas from. I've spoken with an occasional Git hacker, doing a bit of minor evangelism. Hopefully we'll see more work in that direction. It's about developing and sharing good ideas. Software is incidental. If Git becomes way nicer to use as a result of Darcs existing, I'm a happy hacker.