[darcs-users] darcs, lost in space

[David Roundy]

On Sat, Feb 19, 2005 at 02:00:43AM +0100, Vigor van Ort wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 07:51:57 -0500, David Roundy
> > What is the output of darcs whatsnew on the server? 
> 
> Interesting.  Even though all the files look like they are there,
> whatsnew says that they are removed? ("R ...." output).  The second
> local copy does not show this.
> 
> I used md5sum to find out what files are different, and the
> differences are small:
> > diff limp-md5.localcopy.sorted limp-md5.server.sorted
> 33a34
> > 6b5da2c73bce18aa5abd43074f73c0c2  ./_darcs/patches/pending
> 55,56d55
> < c6f738b6d9b43a13ae6970969f610d83  ./_darcs/prefs/defaultrepo
> < c6f738b6d9b43a13ae6970969f610d83  ./_darcs/prefs/repos
> 84a84
> > ec7b9f8be50bb0ebf367f35370ba435b  ./_darcs/prefs/author
> 
> So the server has a patches/pending file, which the local client does
> not..   Even more interesting - the "pending" file shows lots of
> deletions of whole files (and rmfile operations).  I wonder where that
> came from - like I said, all the files seem to be accounted for!

Hmmm.  This sounds like a bug that was fixed in darcs 1.0.1 (after darcs
1.0.1rc3)

Wed Dec 15 08:43:37 EST 2004  David Roundy <droundy at abridgegame.org>
  * fix bug that left junk equal to identity patch in pending.

Were you using by any chance an older version of darcs on the server at one
time? I'm guessing that your pending had rmfiles followed by addfiles of
the same file--so it all came down to no change at all, which is what this
bug did.  I seem to recall a reemergence of similar behavior, although a
brief glance at the history hasn't located a fix to this after
mid-December.

The bug would have happened on an earlier push than the one that hangs, and
in fact you may be able to tell from the identity of the files mentioned in
"pending" which patch caused the trouble.  I guess it's probably the last
push before your one that hung.

If you *weren't* running an older version of darcs than 1.0.1, it would be
great if we can reproduce this, since it would be an unknown (and unfixed!)
bug.  If this is the case (not old darcs) and you can't figure out how to
reproduce the junk in pending, I can give you some suggestions to try, or
if you give me the repository (if that's all right) and I could experiment
a bit.  But hopefully your memory of what you did prior to the problem will
allow you to reproduce it yourself.

I'm adding a little discussion of this to the FAQ on the wiki.  It's not
really complete, but mostly covers what I've said here.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net