[darcs-users] Merge bug lost data when deleting files

[David Roundy]

On Sun, Dec 23, 2007 at 10:04:55PM +1300, szergling wrote:
> I think I've discovered a way darcs will lose valuable user data. All
> unrecorded changes in a file is lost if we pull from another
> repository that had removed that same file. darcs still reports a
> conflict, but there's now no way to "fix" this conflict, because the
> file (along with all unrecorded contents) has been removed.
> 
> Am I mistaken in my mental model of what's going on? My expectation is
> that no data (recorded or not) should ever be deleted when pulling
> (I'm simply *gaining* patches).

This isn't (historically, see below for recent developments) strictly
true.  Conflict marking can definitely mess up local files, and unrecorded
data can be lost.

I believe this is now fixed in darcs unstable (not in 1.0.9), which
generates backups of files involved in conflicts.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University