[darcs-users] Behaviour of add, with non-existent filenames

Owen Stephens darcs at owenstephens.co.uk
Thu Jun 9 11:35:12 UTC 2011


Currently, Darcs will implicitly add the directory containing a to-be-added
file, if it is not known by Darcs. This is desirable, but has shown up some
strange bugs.

Particularly, adding a non-existent file within a newly-added directory will
cause Darcs to print an error message, but it will exit successfully.
Something
like:

$ mkdir subdir
$ cd subdir
$ darcs add foo
File subdir/foo does not exist!
$ echo $?
0
$ darcs wh
adddir ./subdir
$ darcs add foo
File subdir/foo does not exist!

darcs failed:  No files were added
$ echo $?
2

The second time add is called, Darcs exits with a non-zero status, since the
directory has already been added.

The current fix I have coded will only add files/directories if all the
files
specified exist (if any fail to be added, no changes will be made). However,
this could be somewhat heavy-handed - someone might want to specify a long
list
of possibly-existing files, and tolerate the failures.

I can't think of an instance of this use-case (mainly because I tend to add
files using shell-globbing, which wouldn't cause a non-existent name to be
specified), but I'd like to know if anyone has used something that is
similar, where
my change would break the expected behaviour.

What should Darcs do in the case where non-existent files are added?

Cheers,
Owen.
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