Helmut Grohne wrote: > Also keep in mind that we cannot just move packages from /var/lock based > locking to flock() based locking one at a time. If two different > packages compete about a device and they use different locking schemes, > they'll both think they had exclusive access. Going for flock() > practically needs to be a flag-day transition where all packages are > updated at roughly the same time.
I think it would be possible to make this incremental in two steps: - First, port everything using `/var/lock` or `/run/lock` to lock something that has an obvious `flock` target (e.g. a serial device), one-by-one, to use `flock` *and*` a lockfile, silently ignoring permission errors iff it successfully acquired the `flock`. - Second, when everything has been ported *and* we've been through some transition period (using package dependencies in Debian and allowing some time for third-party sotware), we let software start deleting the lockfile code.
