[darcs-devel] [issue1912] avoid invisible conflicts

[Eric Kow]

New submission from Eric Kow <kowey at darcs.net>:

The effect of a conflict in Darcs is to cancel out all sides of the 
conflict.  This creates a lot of confusion and difficulty for users.  It 
means that conflicts can be effectively invisible.

We need a better way for users

1. to be notified that they have a conflict
2. to feel confident that they have successfully resolved the conflict

This is sort of a vague problem identification ticket, and may open up 
to other tickets in the future.

Some ideas proposed:
1. darcs revert -a should do a mark-conflicts afterwards (so that you 
revert to a conflicted state)
2. on push/pull/etc time, darcs should emit "WARNING: You have 
unresolved conflicts in this repository."

I think to make progress on this ticket, we need two things.

First: we need to remind ourselves what exactly Darcs's current 
behaviour is for notifying users that there is a conflict.  So we need 
somebody to read the code and/or just apply/pull some patches and write 
up what happens.  I seem to remember that pull/apply --mark-conflicts 
just tells you that (a) a conflict happened and (b) in what files.  Is 
that all we do?

Second: we need somebody to start a discussion on darcs-users fleshing 
out a UI for addressing this notification problem.  I'm planning to 
start one drawing all the conflict UI tickets together, but in case I 
forget...

(see also related tickets issue833 and issue1911)

----------
messages: 12071
nosy: Quiark, dmitry.kurochkin, kowey
priority: feature
status: need-action
title: avoid invisible conflicts
topic: Conflicts, UI

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Darcs bug tracker <bugs at darcs.net>
<http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1912>
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