[Xmonad] Darcs best practice: Resolving conflicts

[Jason Creighton]

Hi guys,

Dave Glasser and I recently both ran into an issue with darcs trying to
merge patches with changes made locally. (Mine were unrecord; I think
Dave's were recorded but unpushed patches.)

Appearently, this may be due in part to conflicts in the main repo. It
turns out that if you resolve conflicts the wrong way, you can end up
with "merger" patches in the main repo that can cause problems later. I
don't really understand that bit at all.

But anyway, I talked to Heffalump on #darcs about this, and what I took
away from the conversation was this:

Whenever you have conflicts between two recorded patches, you should use
amend-record to fix the conflict instead of making a separate "fix
conflicts" patch. You can't use amend-record on any patch that has been
released into the wild: only patches that have never left your local
repo.

If the conflicts are between a patch and unrecorded local changes, my
understanding is that it's fine to just fix the conflicts in the files
and then record. 

Disclaimer from Heffalump:

11:43 <jcreigh> Heffalump++ Thanks for all your help.
11:44 <jcreigh> I'm going to kick an email out to the xmonad ML warning people about the proper way to resolve conflicts, because at least myself was unaware, so possibly others.
11:44 <Heffalump> I don't think it's widely known.
11:45 <Heffalump> you should probably qualify it as not being advice from someone who is core to darcs development

Disclaimer from me:

The above is my understanding of the situation. I could be wrong.
Hopefully David Roundy will be kind enough to chime in if that is the
case.

Jason Creighton