[darcs-users] darcs repository corruption ("unapplicable" removeFile patch)

[Steven G. Johnson]

Hi, I just noticed that "darcs repair" on one of my repositories fails 
with the error:

darcs: ./Makefile.in: openBinaryFile: does not exist (No such file or directory)

This is with darcs version 2.0.2.  Darcs 1.0.9 gives a similar error, but 
gives a bit more information:

Applying patch 436 of 449... Unapplicable patch:
Tue Jul 31 19:43:29 EDT 2007  stevenj at fftw.org
   * remove Makefile.in files, which are generated by automake
darcs: ./Makefile.in: removeFile: does not exist (No such file or directory)

If I try to do a "darcs get" from the same repository, it complains about 
the same patch.

I did a Google search, and it sounds like someone had an almost identical 
problem in another case:
 	http://osdir.com/ml/network.leafnode/2006/msg00083.html

At some point, in both cases, we had an autogenerated Makefile.in file 
that was recorded in the repository, which we removed, but somehow that 
patch caused a problem.  Is there any way to fix this?

Regards,
Steven G. Johnson

PS. I have a suspicion that this may be the results of an odd interaction 
between Darcs and autotools.  Perhaps one of the automake/autoconf tools 
like autoreconf may at some point have done something to the 
_darcs/current directory, mistaking it for a source directory because of 
the files configure.ac, Makefile.in, etcetera, which is why I encountered 
error for Makefile.in exactly as in the 2006 web page above.  But my 
understanding was that this should not be fatal, since Darcs' real history 
is in the patches list and _darcs/current is just an optimization?