RE: Re: Checkout every file as read-only; make some of them edita ble with a explicit command.

Peter Yamamoto wrote:
[...]
> A person who is about to work on a file that cannot be merged (eg binary
> file of some sort such as may art file formats), can exclusively lock it
> before working on it. When this is part of the workflow, it means that
> people won't waste time working on a file only one of them will be able
> to commit.
[...]
> The point is that this "feature" does serve a valid purpose, and the
> version control layer can act as a very good self-defense mechanism. The
> person who does it right and checks out exclusively before working is
> the person who justifiably can check in their work.

As a discussion point, perhaps it would make sense to have an attribute
that controls this. It would be versioned like any other resource,
so you would see the following scenario:

Alice checks out revision 10.
Bob checks out revision 10.
Alice accepts a task that requires modifying a file, "non-versionable.png".
Alice runs an update, but her working copy is already up to date.
Alice sets an attribute "read-only", perhaps with her username as a value.
Alice commits revision 11.
Alice begins working on the file.
Bob accepts a task that requires modifying the same file.
Bob runs an update, and receives the new "read-only" attribute.
Bob's client sets local filesystem permissions on the file to read only.
Bob begins work on the file, but his editor informs him the file is
read-only.
Alice finishes work on the file.
Alice removes the "read-only" attribute.
Alice issues commits revision 12.
Bob updates to revision 12.
Bob's client sets the local filesystem permissions on the file to
read/write.

Apologies for the verbose explanation, but hopefully it will serve as a
concrete
example for discussion.

(I'm sure this has come up before, but it sounds like a doable solution
within
the existing framework...)

-- 
Robert Hunter
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