On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 10:54 AM, Chris Peachment <ch...@ononbb.com> wrote:
> I'm a novice Fossil user working in a small group with need
> to track both text and binary files.
>
> It seems to me that locks are nice to have for text files
> since 3 way diffs can be merged at relatively little cost.
> But inability to merge binary files might mean painful hand
> merging based on side by side comparisons for word processing
> documents or presentation slides, or based on repeating the
> edits for image files.
>
> So a lock would provide immediate warning when attempting
> checkout that someone else is probably touching the file.
> Out of band communication would be needed to gain access
> - not a bad thing and better than proceeding blindly.
>
The problem is that locking in a distributed environment is hard to do
reliably. "Mostly" reliable could well be worse than no locking at all: you
start to depend on it, and it will then naturally fail at the worst possible
moment.
How about an having a way to flag files - when created - as "read-only" or
some such. (I think someone else may have suggested this). Such files would
be checked out read only, and would require a "-force" to commit. A new
"readonly-glob" setting would help - causing files that matched it to be
flagged as such along the way.
The goal is not to have locks as such, but to alert people to the fact that
a file requires out-of-band communications before it gets changed and/or
committed.
<mike
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