On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)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?