RE: [Issue 533] New - implement reserved checkouts

Software developers do occasionally have binary files that cannot be merged.

Delphi 4 has resource files that are stored in a binary format.

A number of modelling and GUI builder tools have binary format files.

Generally these are propriety tools that may not have any mechanism for
converting the file to text. They generally don't have specialist merge
tools associated with them. As such you need to lock the file since you
cannot do parallel development and merge the results.

Often you want to store image files, for example GIFs. Again no merge tools
available.

Pete

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Blandy [mailto:jimb@red-bean.com]
Sent: 05 August 2002 17:04
To: Greg Stein
Cc: dev@subversion.tigris.org
Subject: Re: [Issue 533] New - implement reserved checkouts

Greg Stein <gstein@lyra.org> writes:
> Oh, geez. This whole thread is way too narrowly scoped. *Everybody* is
> talking about developers and source code. Fine, geez. No locks.

No, no, no. I just figured your point stood, that it was obvious that
locks can be useful for unmergeable file formats, and didn't mention
it further. (I had a sentence like, "This doesn't address Greg's
concerns about unmergeable file formats" in an earlier draft of my
letter, but I left it out for some reason.)

The question I wanted to ask is, are locks useful to software
developers, too? They're often used in that context; is that always
an abuse of technology, or are there situations where it's a good
solution? What makes it a good solution in those cases?

If you want to design behavior that's useful in both contexts, then
you need to ask both questions, right?

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