RE: How to lock CVS for check-in

[Pyatt, Scott]

Greg,

I don't know your environment, but branch locking is a common mechanism 
for allowing read-only access to a branch.  It's really quite useful 
and given the high frequency that this issue pops up in this forum, I'm 
not alone in my view.  I'm not knocking CVS.  Nor am I knocking anyone 
who finds no use in it.  But in companies that have a sizable 
development team, especially one that's globally dispersed, and need to 
many support back releases, branch locking provides a good solution.

Regardless of your SCM needs, there are many of us that would be better 
off having branch locking as a standard feature in CVS.  If adding some 
form of branch locking directly or indirectly (e.g., changing the 
interface to commitinfo) causes other problems, I'll live without it, 
add a kludge or move to a tool that supports it.  I'm okay with those
choices, IF there is a technical reason for CVS to not support branch
locking.

You say that it solves the wrong problem.  Given an example from my day 
yesterday, a developer was swapping between a couple of workspaces to 
compare what gets built in a release that is to ship in a few months 
with one that shipped months back.  She accidentally checked in part of 
a new feature in a back release.  Hey, she's human and fifteen minutes 
later I had the problem fixed.  Our organization is large enough that
this is a common problem, not because of one or two idiots, but because
of the shear number of developers, with differing levels of experience, 
and number of branches, this problem keeps popping up.  

The right solution to the right problem may be to genetically engineer 
developers that don't make mistakes, but it might be a bit easier to 
implement branch locking.

-Scott

-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2001 1:46 PM
To: Jake Colman
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: How to lock CVS for check-in


[ On , October 11, 2001 at 14:41:17 (-0400), Jake Colman wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: How to lock CVS for check-in
>
> So what do _you_ recommend for implementing branch locking?

I don't recommend implementing branch locking in CVS at all.

Anyone who thinks they need it probably has far larger problems that
branch locking won't really solve in the first place.  It's a bad
workaround to the wrong problem.

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <address@hidden>     <address@hidden>
Planix, Inc. <address@hidden>;   Secrets of the Weird <address@hidden>

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