[darcs-users] Bounty on the conflict misery bug

Alexander Staubo alex at purefiction.net
Fri Aug 17 15:40:49 UTC 2007


We are a five-person team who use Darcs for version control. We are
quite happy with this, but occasionally our workday is disrupted by
conflicts that send Darcs spinning into an endless, CPU-gobbling loop
from hell.

Most Darcs user should be familiar with this issue:

  http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/ConflictMisery

As far as I know it has existed since day one, and discussed many times:

  http://marc.info/?l=darcs-users&m=113600774107991&w=2

Not too long ago two developers wasted an entire day when a
long-running branch simply could not be merged into the trunk; we were
on a deadline, and the solution was a manual, time-consuming process
where it was difficult to prove with certainty that the end result was
fully consistent.

We have gradually realized that the probability of hitting this
problem grows proportionally to the age of any branch. This is a
considerable and costly problem for us -- developer time is simply too
expensive to be wasted on fighting the version control system.

We have patiently been waiting for a fix, but there seems to be
nothing on the horizon.

With all this in mind, we would like to try throwing some money at the
problem by putting up a bounty. We want to offer something in the
order of a couple of thousand dollars at a minimum, to be negotiated
with anyone willing to take up the offer.

Are there any takers?

Alexander.



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