> I had always worked in the "locks" world and thought it was better than
> the CVS model. I have been doing a lot of J2EE development lately and it
> would be virtually impossible to do in a locking version control system as
> there are so many XML files that EVERYONE has to be able to edit and
> modify to do any work. If the file was always locked no one could ever do
> anything.
>
> Mark
This causes me to wonder about updating
what is now a long-forgotten Version Control
technology:
CVS, SVN, etc. are file based - they lock at file
granularity. Using merging instead of locking
allows non-conflicting edits to different parts
of the same file. (Unfortunately, it occasionally
also allows conflicting edits - but even file
based locking doesn't solve that.)
I've occasionally heard people talk about VC
systems based on the "deck of cards" paradigm
- where you locked several particular regions,
basically line numbers, typically scaled up
to procedures, etc., of the source.
There are many problems with this approach
to fine grain locking, including:
* it's a pain to specify ranges of line
numbers (aka cards). You always need
to round up to granularities such as
procedures (with/without argument lists), etc.
* tracking changing line numbers ...
basically, this is what the diff / merge
tools do.
* UNIX doesn't allow inserts into the middle
of a file - even if you are on one on the UNIXes
that allow byte regions of a file to be locked,
typically somebody will want to insert
lines before than position.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Tue Jun 1 21:37:11 2004