Re: [Arx-users] Wedged another archive

[Kevin Smith]

Walter Landry wrote:
> Correct.  If "patch" could have applied the patch, it already would
> have.  To resolve the patch, you resolve it by hand by cutting and
> pasting appropriate lines from the .rej file.  Alternately, if you're
> using emacs, you can use the prescription I linked to earlier.

Any idea if xxdiff is capable of handling this? Will meld work if/when I 
 can get it installed? I have no interest in learning emacs, so that's 
not an option for me.

> Switch the order of the merge commands.  So where you originally did
> something like
>
>   arx merge merged_arx address@hidden/arx.2.1 address@hidden/arx.kevins
>
> instead do
>
>   arx merge merged_arx address@hidden/arx.kevins address@hidden/arx.2.1

Hm. Is it abnormal that I feel drawn to doing my merging in-place? Maybe 
that's one of the main reasons I keep ending up wedged. It just feels 
wrong to me to create a whole new tree just to pull in some changes. 
Perhaps you could provide a little of the philosophy to help me 
understand why in-place would be worse (or better) than the new tree method.

[Side note: One of the things that irritates me about darcs is that it 
always wants you to create new trees for everything. On Linux, it uses 
hard links, but on Windows or on a cheap web host, that's not an option. 
It always bothered me a bit, from a purist theoretical standpoint.]

> Agh!  You probably should not have run delete-revision.  I should put
> more warnings and make it more difficult to use.  It is really only
> meant for removing things that should not be in the archive (e.g. huge
> binaries, kiddie porn).

Ok. But shouldn't it have automatically built a new checksum file, or 
otherwise managed to leave the archive in a usable state? For now, the 
docs should at least say that it will leave the archive in an unusable 
state. I was only deleting the most-recent change, after all.

> This is a bug.  This should have worked.  In the meantime, try tagging
> instead
>
>   arx tag address@hidden/arx.kevins,1 address@hidden/arx.kevins

address@hidden arx $ arx tag address@hidden/arx.kevins,1 
address@hidden/arx.kevins
No such revision in the archive
        address@hidden/arx.kevins,2

> In any case, what you really wanted to do was something like
>
>   arx get address@hidden/arx.2.1 wlandry_arx
>   arx history --dir wlandry_arx --add address@hidden/arx.kevins
>   arx tree-branch address@hidden/arx.kevins
>   arx commit -s "Reverted to wlandry's code"
>
> That will create a revision that reverts all of the changes that you
> made, but still records that you made those changes.  This is
> described in Section 5.8.2.1.

Yeah. It seemed icky when I read the general docs, and it seems just as 
icky when I see the specific version here. It looks like we're creating 
another tree. The history command still seems awkward (and error prone) 
to me. I guess the whole sequence just seems like a counter-intuitive 
way to accomplish the goal. I'm not sure I would have been able to 
figure out the above steps on my own.

Maybe what I really want is a nice gui that hides all this from me. I 
guess I've been spoiled by the eclipse cvs plugin that actually makes 
cvs seem decent, even when merging conflicting work from other 
developers. I may write a gui tool for ArX, if I can figure out what I 
want it to do.

I'm trying to remain optimistic about all this. I know that ArX hasn't 
been used heavily by very many people yet (and especially people like me 
who only use 10% of revision control features). As long as all these 
kinds of issues are "solveable" (via functionality changes, better 
prompting, more docs, external tools, etc), I'm not worried.

Kevin