Conflict Recovery

[defunkt]

Currently it's a bit hard to recover from a conflict, especially if it's something stupid, e.g. rake 1.2 and rake 1.0 are both required and you know just rake 1.2 will suffice but the damn thing won't install.

When that happens you have to open the deps.rip of the package depending on rake 1.0 and remove that line. It works, but it's not easy.

A primitive but amazing way to handle this would be to write out a .rip file in /tmp listing all packages rip-detect-conflicts was given - conflicts and all. You then remove or change packages and versions and, when you're finished, save and exit the file. rip-detect-conflicts will run again on the /tmp file and, if all goes well, exit with 0 and print the new list of packages to install.

Let's call this rip install -i because it's based on the git rebase -i interface.

While some package managers take the Darcs approach to resolving conflicts ("let's fix all dependencies with science!"), rip should prefer the git approach ("here's what happened, use your brain and fix it").

[josh]

yes!

users are smart enough to resolve this stuff on their own. i've wanting a way to "just make this combination work damn it!".