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Re: feature request remote locking

From: Ben Collins-Sussman <sussman_at_red-bean.com>
Date: 2006-01-25 21:25:15 CET

On 1/25/06, Wim Bonjean <wimb@but.be> wrote:

> But I do not understand why it is not implemented as follows: (Subversion
> after all does support this.)
>

(Speaking as a subversion developer, not a TSVN developer)

Subversion does not support this. It doesn't remember remote locks in
your working copy. Like TSVN, subversion only shows remote locks when
you talk to the server ('svn st -u', or 'svn ls URL'). We
deliberately did *not* cache remote lock information in the working
copy, because we feel it would be out of date far too quickly.

> Or even better, why not have an option that on every access to a svn folder
> automatically does a modification check, and updates the icons, status,
> remote lock owners,…
>
> In that way users that have svn running on a fast intranet environment can
> make use of this and have a much better usability.
>

Subversion was designed with the idea that the network is a scarce
resource: try to use it as little as possible. Transfer as few bytes
as possible, do as many operations offline as possible, and so on.
You're essentially proposing a very different system, an SCM that's
intensely LAN-based and makes continuous network requests... much like
perforce or clearcase. I think it's just a philosophical difference
in design. Subversion is a WAN application, not a LAN application.
It's not easy to just "add a switch" to make it LAN-ish. :-)

It sounds like you want this feature because people are constantly
locking and unlocking things on your team, and you want to be able to
keep an eye on what people are doing. We already have two mechanisms
for helping with this:

  * don't just send commit emails, send lock/unlock emails too. Make
sure people give descriptive messages when the lock things, so you can
see why they're locking.

  * put 'svn:needs-lock' property on binary (or non-mergeable) files.
That causes the file to be read-only all of the time. When you try to
edit the file, you'll notice that it's read-only. When you try to
lock it (to make the file writable), you'll possibly get a notice that
someone else has already locked it.
Received on Wed Jan 25 21:29:02 2006

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