[darcs-users] outstanding important bugs (was: announcing 1.0.2rc3)

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Dear David and Dedicated Darcs Devels:

Thank you very much for the work you've put in to creating this nice 
tool and freely sharing it with me.

As I have spent many hours of my own precious time writing bug reports, 
generating minimal buggy repos, and so forth, I would like to know what 
plans you have for fixing the bugs I've reported before or after you 
release darcs v1.0.2.

I just now used bugs.darcs.net to find all bugs reports that I've 
submitted which are important bugs and which are not yet fixed.  This 
is excluding many more bug reports from me that were about user 
interface issues or wishlist items.  It is also excluding one bug 
report that I submitted for an important bug but which I never 
submitted a repo tarball to help you reproduce it.  So the following 
list contains only bugs that corrupt a repository or prevent a user 
from being able to continue using darcs on a repository and that I had 
at one time provided a repo for you to be able to reproduce the bug.

The purpose of this message is not *only* to publically pressure you to 
fix bugs which are biting me, but also because I'm honestly curious 
what sort of policy or plan you have for balancing outstanding bugs 
against new stable releases of darcs.  A fellow open source hacker 
recently inquired of me whether he should try moving his project to 
darcs, and I answered "No, not until it is a little less buggy.".  I do 
look forward to darcs becoming a little less buggy and that guy trying 
darcs out, because it would make it much easier for me to share source 
code with him.

Regards,

Zooko

#101: Fail: bug in darcs! Problem resolving conflicts in resolve!
http://bugs.darcs.net//Ticket/Display.html?id=101
Unfortunately I've lost the buggy repo tarball that I generated for 
this when I first hit the bug last November.  Unless David has a copy 
of the tarball that I submitted we'll have to treat this one as 
irreproducible.

#119: Error applying patch to working dir.
http://bugs.darcs.net//Ticket/Display.html?id=119
I've lost the tarball for this one, from last December.   We had a disk 
space crunch on my server.  I guess from now on I'll submit the 
tarballs as attachments to the bug tracker instead of storing them on 
my web site.  Although they are perhaps too big to be submitted that 
way.

#132: bug report: Fail: r_u commute bug, contact droundy at ag.o!
http://bugs.darcs.net//Ticket/Display.html?id=132
I submitted this last December, and although I do have a tarball I made 
later that same day, it is probably not a complete tarball of the 
problem.  What a shame!

#161: Error applying patch to working dir.
http://bugs.darcs.net//Ticket/Display.html?id=161
I've submitted a minimal buggy repository showing this bug.

#166: unrevert results in "WARNING: You may now have a corrupt (but 
fixable) repository."
http://bugs.darcs.net//Ticket/Display.html?id=166
The tarball containing this repo is still available.

#176: darcs bug report: indelible conflict
http://bugs.darcs.net//Ticket/Display.html?id=176
There are many repos available that show this bug.  This is my least 
favorite bug right now (excluding the "matter/antimatter O(2^N)" design 
issue), because it bites me approximately once a day.

#190: some kind of failure and possible corruption
http://bugs.darcs.net//Ticket/Display.html?id=190
There is a tarball available containing the state of my repo *after* 
this bug bit.  Hopefully that is sufficient to find the bug.