[darcs-users] single user repository fails darcs check

[David Roundy]

The most common cause of repository corruption is tools that recurse
through the directory tree modifying files as they go (dreamweaver is the
classic example, but automake has also been known to do this).  These tools
can go into the _darcs/pristine/ directory and there modify darcs' internal
cache.

In this case, it looks like you ran a dos2unix program recursively on your
repository, which corrupted the cache.  This can probably be fixed (in a
dangerous way, using a copy of the repo) by gunzipping all the patches,
running dos2unix on them all (thus purging your history of '\r') and
running darcs repair.

We have plans to some day implement a repository format that is less likely
to be corrupted by users, mostly by making the names of the files in the
pristine cache a bit more opaque.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University