What are some arguments against locking?

Holger Hoffstaette holger at wizards.de
Thu Jun 26 07:20:41 CDT 2008


On Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:00:34 -0400, Paul Chiusano wrote:

> I am currently evaluating Mercurial for use at my company, where we
> currently use StarTeam (gak!). One of my coworkers seems to think that
> locking is a very useful feature and that it is a nonstarter to even
> consider a VCS without it. Although I disagree strongly with this, I
> haven't been too successful in convincing him, so I thought I would ask
> people here for some additional arguments for why locking is not usually
> useful.

The gist is that locking is a seemingly working technical solution to a
social (management) problem. Working merges are obviously not a problem
(despite their fears); merge conflicts are simply the result of a
communication failure. The absence of locking in a cooperation mechanism
(which an scm is) more often than not brings dysfunctional team structures
to light (commit wars, locking to gain ownership or block others);
unsurprisingly, not too many people (especially control-oriented
personalities) want to see them, or even think about them too hard.
That being said, the one good point in favor of locking is working on
unmergeable binaries, assuming that the repo is shared. As others have
pointed out, this is fundamentally impossible in a disconnected
distributed system.

-h




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