[darcs-users] bugs in darcs 0.9.17 (or earlier)

Tim Barbour trb at eastpac.com.au
Tue Mar 2 22:18:32 UTC 2004


Hi,

I have recently encountered three bugs in darcs. I am currently running 0.9.17,
but was running an earlier version (0.9.16 ?) when one of the problems began.

First, darcs does not seem to have any "quiet" option (e.g. '-q'), to suppress
informational messages in contexts where they are unwelcome.

Second, darcs writes error messages on stdout, instead of stderr. This means that
it is difficult to distinguish, in a script, between informational messages and
errors. I have been running darcs push from a script, like this:

darcs push --repodir $local_repo/$p -a --and-apply $r/$p > /dev/null

- note the redirection of stdout to /dev/null. I had to do this to get rid of
its chatter (since I ran this script from cron, any output would be mailed to
me). Recently the script was mysteriously failing, with no error message, since
the error message (on stdout) had gone to /dev/null.

Third, the push above fails for one of my repositories, like this:

trb at hermes:/wks/trb/hack/klunk> darcs push --repodir /wks/trb/hack/pmm -a --and-apply trb at 10.140.1.1:/var/www/darcs/hack/pmm
Pushing to trb at 10.140.1.1:/var/www/darcs/hack/pmm...
So far so good... finished merging.
Error applying patch to recorded!

Perhaps this is a consequence of the recent bug in darcs 0.9.16, because I
forgot to upgrade the destination server to 0.9.17 until yesterday. I have
upgraded now, but the problem is still there. However, the problem may have been
there for some time, the reason being that I disabled the cron job (IIRC darcs
did not seem to like running from cron), and ran the push script manually (the
error message went to /dev/null anyway). I only noticed the problem by finding
something missing from the destination repository. The source repository has 22
patches, and the destination repository has only 11. Looking at the dates on the
patches, the push stopped working on 2004-1-3.

The destination repository, and a copy of the source repository, are available
at:

http://categorical.net/darcs/hack/pmm.darcs-bug/
http://categorical.net/darcs/hack/pmm/

respectively. As you can see, I renamed away the destination repository, and put
a copy of the source repository in its place. The push runs okay against the new
destination repository, but it might still be worth tracking down the bug.

Tim




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