what, if anything, can I do to make my 1.04 repos into happy 1.05 ones??
The simple solution would be to use 1.04 to generate all the historical versions of your project, and then manually record them one by one in a new repo. Another solution would be to simply discard history, and make a new repo starting at the current version.
OK. In the case, I don't mind losing the history. If I did care, I'm not quite sure what you mean by "generating the historical versions..." Can you point me in the right direction?
Just manually create a new repo with the history you care about. For each version, use 1.0.4 to get a copy of that version, for example using darcs dist, then record this version in the new repo.
You can use ``darcs record --pipe'' to force Darcs to use the original date and author for the new patch.
The alternative is to manually edit the patches under _darcs/patches in order to fix the inconsistency. If you look at the darcs-users list archives, you'll find a happy user (Vincent Balat) who recently had just the same problem as you and successfully performed some major surgery on _darcs/patches, so it is definitely doable without full grokking of the Darcs sources.
Juliusz