Strange result of forced merge

[Matt Mackall]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 10:59:06AM +0100, Michal Krause wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> we use Mercurial for development of midsize projects in team of 6 
> developers. Two times one developer used hg merge -f (because he had 
> outstanding uncommitted changes) and result of this operation was that 
> all changes made by other developers between both heads were completely 
> lost in repository, but they all appear in developer's working copy as 
> uncommitted.

I'm not sure what you're describing here but I suspect something else is
happening.

> I know that merge -f is potentially dangerous operation and it probably 
> should not be used, but I'd like to know what can be the real cause of 
> such result of merging, because developer who made it swears that he 
> didn't made anything special and all my attempts to simulate it in 
> testing environment failed (all merges including forced worked as expected).

Perhaps it's a problem with his environment. Does his merge tool work
correctly?

> By the way, is there a chance that Mercurial will allow merging with 
> uncommitted changes if they don't conflict with both heads being merged?

Merge -f should work as expected. It's just a bad idea as it records
two steps as one.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.