Re: questions on cvs locking

[David H. Thornley]

Yuhe Liu wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> We are using CVS for CM. It came with a problem that multiple developers
> were updating
> a same file. Although cvs provides lock/unlock commands, it seems not
> convenient.
> 
Why do you consider this a problem?  I'm serious.  In practice,
the CVS way of letting several developers update a file and merging
the results works very well, at least in some domains.  Why wouldn't
it work for you?

The alternatives seem to me to be either that only one developer
works on any file at one time, which can cause intolerable
delays in getting things done, or more than one does, and one
of them has to manually merge the changes.

> 
> Is there any solution?
> 
CVS has "cvs watch" and "cvs edit" commands so that developers
can find out who's working on what.  It doesn't stop anybody
from violating whatever process you've got, but if your developers
are deliberately violating process you've got a much bigger
problem than concurrent vs. serialized development.

I've seen problems with conflicting changes with a locking source
code system.  In fact, the old trick of writing "See me if you're
working on this - David" on the master listing (back when I worked
in an environment with master listing books) worked at least as
well.

-- 
David H. Thornley                          Software Engineer
at CES International, Inc.:  address@hidden or (763)-694-2556
at home: (612)-623-0552 or address@hidden or
http://www.visi.com/~thornley/david/