[darcs-users] User interface for conflicts: confusing enough to lose data

[Andrew Pimlott]

[Replying to old mail.]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 06:42:13AM -0400, David Roundy wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 27, 2004 at 06:22:11PM +0200, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> > I've just lived through my first merge conflict with darcs.  It wasn't
> > a pretty sight.

I think this is essentially the same issue I ran into in the message
"can't unpull after a conflict", on May 5.

> This is definitely an area that needs work, but since it needs a lot of
> work, I'm postponing most of the work until after darcs 1.0.  There are
> enough people using darcs for real work that I don't want to destabilize
> things by trying to fix this.  Although some of the interface things can be
> fixed now (see below), getting conflicts really right is post-1.0
> business.

For me, this is the main reason for not using darcs (for real) now.  It
would make me feel a lot better if I had an idea of how it will be
solved.

> > In summary, just doing ``darcs pull; darcs revert'' will make
> > conflicts impossible to note by any of the official tools in darcs.

One workaround is to pull the whole repository into an empty repo.

> It would probably be a good idea to add a "re-resolve conflicts" command of
> some sort.  This wouldn't be too hard to code, but I'm not sure what I'd
> call it.

Sounds useful.

> Because looking for unresolved conflicts is slow, we don't want to do it if
> we can possibly avoid it.

Possibly there could simply be an "unresolved conflicts" flag.

Andrew