CVS does not currently support exclusive locks on checked out files in a
meaningful way. There is a subset of CVS users who believe that such a
feature is useful and necessary for certain data types that do not lend
themselves to the concurrent model. There has been much heated debate as
to whether or not such a feature can or should be added to CVS.
There are at present two features that may or may not suit your needs, if
you absolutely require some kind of exclusive rights upon checkout. The
first is "cvs admin -l" as you have seen in the documentation. That method
is strongly discouraged because it requires too much special handling and
does not work well in many scenarios. There is also a non-zero probability
that it will be removed in the future.
The second is Noel Yap's "cvs edit -c" patch, which provides relatively
good communication and requires a user to declare intent to make a
modification in advance before allowing a commit. It's not true exclusive
locking, but it's close enough to fill the requirements of many shops.
How to get the patch is left as an exercise for the reader, though.
>--- Forwarded mail from [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>I've been watching the exchanges here about this, and while I don't want
>to start any wars, I'd like to get a clarification about something.
>As I understand the CVS manual, the only way to have exclusive locks on
>checkout is to combine cvs checkout with cvs admin (there's a race
>condition there, right?). From what I've been reading (not necessarily
>just the manual), my impression is that this facility (exclusive
>checkout) may go away in the future. I'd like to know if that's correct.
>We're using Sniff on top of RCS right now, and I'd like to move us to
>CVS in order to facilitate checkin/checkout from lab machines which
>don't have Sniff installed. However, we want an exclusive checkout
>model.
>I really don't want to debate whether that's a good or bad decision, I'd
>really just like to know if a) my understanding about this is right, and
>2) it's supportable in the long term without capturing and maintaining
>some version of CVS internally.
>I'd appreciate your indulgence on this. I've been reading documentation
>and playing with it for a few days now, but I'm not sure if I'm even
>asking the question correctly.
>--- End of forwarded message from [EMAIL PROTECTED]
