[darcs-users] conflicts: best practices?

Simon Marlow simonmar at microsoft.com
Thu Feb 2 17:05:02 UTC 2006


Ok, now that darcs is managing the GHC source tree, we want to have a 
clear story for dealing with conflicts as and when they arise, 
particularly because it seems that making a mistake with conflicts can 
give you headaches in the future.

I've read everything I can find:

http://www.abridgegame.org/darcs/manual/node6.html#SECTION00635000000000000000
http://darcs.net/DarcsWiki/ConflictMisery?highlight=%28conflict%29
http://darcs.net/DarcsWiki/ConfictMiseryAnalysis
http://zooko.com/darcs_demystified.html

and various mailing list postings, but it's difficult to find a clear 
explanation of what the issues are.  Maybe that's because it's a complex 
issue, but if I can nail down all the points I'm happy to summarise it 
in a new wiki page.

The "best practices" section in the manual is illuminating (but why is 
the *only* information on conflicts in the manual in the "best 
practices" section?).  It doesn't say anything about avoiding the 
exponential black hole problem, though.

I'm quite happy with the concept of avoiding conflicts by unrecording 
and re-recording new patches when necessary, but this is not always 
convenient: I might have a whole slew of recorded patches in my working 
copy, so unrecording one at the bottom of the pile is going to be a 
pain.  "just fixing the conflict" seems right, but might it leave a 
"poison patch" in my repo?  (and what are they?).

This seems to be folklore, so as I said, I'm happy to record wisdom in 
the wiki.  What are the recommendations to definitely avoid darcs 
disappearing down a blackhole with your repository in the future?

Cheers,
	Simon





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