[darcs-users] a frustrating bug: 'conflicts in pending'

[David Roundy]

On Sat, Oct 23, 2004 at 01:34:56PM +0000, Mark Stosberg wrote:
> I tried some more this morning to recreate the steps that allow this to
> happen and I couldn't do it. In some ways it doesn't matter-- darcs
> should be robust. Not only it should it prevent this happening, it
> should be able to recover from it anyway.  

I disagree.  Whenever there is a conflict in pending, it indicates a
potentially serious bug in darcs, and could cause serious problems with
your repository.  Automatically "fixing" this is a bad idea.

On the other hand, better documenting what this message means, and how to
deal with it, would be a good idea.

> As a extra measure, darcs could check for a potential conflict /before/
> updating the pending file, and refuse to update it in a way that would
> cause a conflict it couldn't solve itself. 
> 
> That at least would give you a hint exact what the command with the
> issue/bug was. 

Agreed, since this *is* a bug condition, it would be nice to notice it in
time to fix it.  I'm adding in a test for this, and a big scary error
message to go with it.  Hopefully relatively soon we can remove the test,
since it's not cheap, but for now, I think it'll be helpful.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org