Re: Reserved checkouts.

[David H. Thornley]

Richard Sharp wrote:
> 
> Members Equity Email System
> But I do need to use reserved checkouts - I have examined the issues for and
> against and have decided on reserved checkouts. Some of our files will not
> be able to be merged as they are graphic files etc. Any ideas ?
> 
You don't need reserved checkouts in CVS, for the very simple
reason that a CVS checkout is not the same thing as a checkout
in a locking system.  In a locking system, a checkout typically
gets a local copy of the file and locks it; in CVS, a checkout
gets a local copy of the file and sets up the metadata for it.

What you want is some way of controlling who's working on the
file at any given time, and the CVS way to do that is to set
"cvs watch on" all files that you want to control, and ask
the developers to use "cvs edit" to unlock them.  This isn't
strict locking, but rather advisory.  Having worked with both,
I can testify that strict locking doesn't stop people from
working simultaneously on a file and blowing away other people's
changes, and advisory locking seems to work as well as strict.

So, add your binary files with -kb (or use cvs admin to put that
on later), make sure there is a "cvs watch on" on all of them,
and instruct your developers on the correct procedure.  Violation
of that procedure should be treated as any other act of sabotage.

(Noel Yap wrote some patches to put teeth into the watch/edit
process, and these can be found at the RCVS project at Sourceforge,
last I looked.  These patches were written against an earlier
version of CVS, so use with caution.)

-- 
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/