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RE: [TSVN] how should the UI look like

From: J. Richard Mills <rmills_at_cigital.com>
Date: 2005-04-08 21:02:07 CEST

Another vote, FWIW:

> So, how should we do this in an UI way?
> - try to lock, throw an error if someone else already has the lock,
> don't allow to override the lock at all.
> - before attempting to lock, ask the user if he want's to override a
> maybe existing lock and then just force the lock no matter what
> - Allow to redo the lock from the progress dialog once a lock
> has failed
> and this time just steal the lock
> - ???

I think I'm with #3. This comes from the "MS Word" perspective
(primarily because it's those kind of users who will be using locks a
lot), as well as a user of TortoiseCVS:

1) Attempt the lock
2) If it fails, throw up a box "Locked by So-and-so on mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm.
Do you want to steal the lock?"
3) Try to steal the lock, if *that* fails (i.e. due to permissions,
server config, whatever), then throw the error back.

I'm assuming that the server will take care of notifying the previous
locker that her lock has been stolen and who stole it.

Alternate option 2.1 might be "Request notification when lock becomes
available." All of this, BTW, is exactly the way the MS Office products
work IIRC. I didn't read far enough to know whether the SVN server is
going to support his kind of notification hook. Sounds like it could be
implemented with the post-unlock hook if people want it.

On a separate note:

Also from the UI perspective: "lock" and "unlock" might not make
intuitive sense to your general purpose dummy user (Audience #2 from
http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/notes/locking/locking-ui.txt).
Especially since the commands actually do the *opposite* of what they
claim from the user perspective. The "lock" actually changes it from
read-only (i.e. locked) to read-write (i.e. unlocked) so that you can
edit the file. Perhaps "reserve" and "unreserve" or "edit and "unedit"
as a UI-label make more sense (?). I got used to "cvs edit" from
TortoiseCVS and command line, so that always made sense to me. All of
this is probably addressed with 30 seconds of instructions, but you
never know with the modern user.

Yes, I realize SVN is not CVS, but it's a good reference point.

Sorry if I'm generating non-contextual noise.

Rich

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Received on Fri Apr 8 21:02:55 2005

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