Re: Locking a branch

[Kaz Kylheku]

On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, Pat Young wrote:

> Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2002 14:12:04 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Pat Young <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: [info-cvs] Locking a branch
> 
> What is the best way to lock a branch?  Should I use

How about:

``Please don't commit to this branch until told otherwise, or you
will be fired on grounds of inability to follow instructions.''

Why work with people that require a piece of software to stop them from
doing what they aren't supposed to?

In any case, even if you had a way to do it, you would still want to
send out a notice, so that people can organize their work according to
the newly imposed restriction, rather than run into it when they
attempt to commit some completed work.

> the admin -l option?  I tried this and couldn't get it
> to work.  I have also seen some previous post
> suggesting to create a #commitinfo file.  We would
> like to be able to lock a complete branch, so that
> developers can not accidentally commit changes to the
> branch.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Make a tag on the branch. That tag will identify the baseline that you
care about, regardless of any subsequent commits.  (A better question
would be, how to lock some tags so they can't be deleted or moved!
The answer is you can't).

Locking files against commits just doesn't make sense in a version
control system, because old versions are not destroyed by new
versions.

In effect, a commit operation is a function that takes a repository and
returns a new repository with added material.

A branch is created so that the users have an appropriate place for
certain kinds of commits. If you could lock a branch, you would take
away the reason for its existence.

-- 
Meta-CVS: solid version control tool with directory structure versioning. 
http://users.footprints.net/~kaz/mcvs.html  http://freshmeat.net/projects/mcvs