[darcs-users] Merging Concepts after getting Public Patches.

[Aggelos Economopoulos]

On Monday 27 September 2004 23:06, Andrew Pimlott wrote:
[...]
> It's not in a "virtual state", you just have to understand what darcs
> considers to be the result of applying conflicting patches.  This is
> badly documented, which I think results in much of the confusion.

It was badly documented, but now we have your wonderful description of the 
problem. Only I can't see where it could go in the manual :(

[...]
> > When you pulled the conflict into your repository, darcs decorated
> > your working directory with random noise (such as conflict markers),
> > in prevision of your editing the files and recording a resolution.
> > Obviously, the conflict markers conflict with both members of the
> > merger, which is a little bit too much for darcs to deal with.
>
> This is (as I've argued before) a serious usability problem.  It's not
> the user's fault that there are pending differences!  darcs has, by
> meddling with your files (adding conflict markers), made it impossible
> to unpull the conflicting patch.  I gave my ideas in
>
>     http://www.abridgegame.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2004-May/001718.html

But according to David's reply this is a post-1.0 thing...

Here's an idea: how about we (er, actually you guys) create a "known bugs" 
section in the manual (with your analysis of how conflict markers 
scre^Wdamage the repo as the initial entry) and move development over to the 
unstable repo so David can work on fixing the merging code whenever he feels 
like it, without worrying about breaking things?

At least /this/ user would prefer seeing progress in the fundamental issues 
*now* instead of "after 1.0", which has been around the corner for *many* 
months and could very well get tagged in 2005. Really, the "To do before 1.0" 
items aren't /that/ scary - I think we can live with them even if nobody 
bothers to fix them in the stable tree.

Aggelos