[darcs-users] recovering changes trashed by conflicting ./addfile

[Craig M.Lennox]

taral at taral.net (Taral) writes:
> 
> darcs resolve produces a proposed resolution of one of the two files.
> You'll have to hand-merge it and then record a new patch.

Right, I've tried that.  I still end up with the merger.  There are, I
think, a couple of potential issues.  One is purely mechanical: Darcs
may be trying to perform a three-way merge about a common ancestor
which doesn't exist, and is simply failing to cope.  The other issue
runs a bit deeper however:

When confronted with two files created independently but with the same
name, should Darcs consider them to be two separate files with a name
clash, or should it consider them to be fundamentally the same file?
In a distributed environment, the more likely scenario is that two
people accidentally used the same name for a new file without
consulting the other.  Given that situation, the easy solution is
renaming one of the files, but that doesn't resolve the problem as far
as Darcs is concerned; it carries on wanting to merge both files'
contents as if they were the same file.  Tragically that approach
leaves one no way out of the paradox of two independently-arising
"addfile" patches for the same file.  The result is a merger that
never goes away.

Craig