On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
I've used locks quite a few times, they're quite useful when you're doing major work on a file and you know half a dozen people are trying to fix your spacing at the same time. I don't think they should be disabled.
You can only discover that there's a lock on the file when you actually commit, though, right? So instead of you having to merge some conflicts when you commit, their commit fails and they have to save their patch somewhere and merge their changes with yours later. That doesn't seem like a big improvement overall -- it's more convenient for you and less convenient for them. Particularly if they forget to commit again later, or don't bother saving their changes anywhere.
If you really want this effect, though, couldn't you just resolve the conflict by overwriting their commit? I mean, when you get the merge conflict, just resolve it completely in favor of you, and say in the commit message that they should recommit their changes. This will only work if there are no interactions with other files, but really, how often does this happen? Do you habitually keep changes in your local copy for days at a time or something?