Re: Reserved checkouts

"B. W. Fitzpatrick" <fitz@red-bean.com> writes:

> When I explained the concept of copy-modify-merge, several of them
> were absolutely horrified at the concept.

Next time you shock people with CVS's model, I think Jim Blandy's
thoughts on this subject are great. (Taken from the Subversion spec:)

-----
Some version control systems provide ``locks'', which prevent others
from changing a file once one person has begun working on it. In our
experience, merging is preferable to locks, because:

  * changes usually do not conflict, so Subversion's behavior does the
    right thing by default, while locking can interfere with
    legitimate work;

  * locking can prevent conflicts within a file, but not conflicts
    between files (say, between a C header file and another file that
    includes it), so it doesn't really solve the problem; and finally,
    
  * people often forget that they are holding locks, resulting in
    unnecessary delays and friction.
-----

These are exactly the kind of experiences I had working at my previous
job, where about 50 programmers all used Microsoft VSS. Moreover, it
was aggravating that I had no way automagically update my working
copy. People were constantly sending out mass-emails: "Hey, I just
checked in these 3 files -- everybody go fetch them and rebuild."
Ugh. :)
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:12 2006