[darcs-users] single user repository fails darcs check

[Dan North]

Hi folks.

I'm a darcs newbie so please bear with me. I've been trying darcs out on 
a small piece of work - I'm the only user, and I've just been doing 
local edits, moving files around and happily darcs recording as I go. 
Nothing out of the ordinary. Then I noticed the darcs check command and 
thought I'd give it a whirl.

It turns out that patch 5 of my current 7 (I told you I was new) fails, 
but it isn't telling me anything useful. It tells me which file fails, 
but I'm not sure how to diagnose it further (or for that matter why it 
should be broken in the first place).

Applying patch 5 of 7... Unapplicable patch:
Fri Aug  3 16:14:42 BST 2007  Dan North <dan at tastapod.com>
  * [dn] starting to convert mocha to rspec mocks

darcs failed:  Error applying hunk to file 
./rspec/spec/spec/story/simple_step_behaviour.rb

I snooped around in the _darcs/patches directory and found the offending 
patch file, but it contains lots of references to the broken file 
(simple_story_behaviour.rb) because I had changed the whitespace through 
the whole file (so there are several chunks of deletes and adds of 
nearly-identical lines).

One other thing I noticed: if I darcs get the repository locally it 
works (amazingly quickly), bringing all 7 patches with it. But if I 
darcs pull it into a new (empty) repository, it fails on patch 5 with 
the same message.

I copied a "darcs get" of the repository onto my server so I could give 
you guys a url, but that fails at the same spot using darcs get from the 
url. (It's http://tastapod.com/~dan/rspec/ if you're interested).

Please advise, because I love the idea of darcs but I can't use it if 
it's going to randomly corrupt the patch history - or if I'm using it in 
a way that's going to get me into trouble.

Thanks,
Dan