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Re:Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019) by wyoung2 on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @11:03AM (#21981201)
The only way to make that simple is to centralize the version control system so that you can have a single arbiter of who has what locked. To add easy locking to Git, you'd have to turn it back into a non-distributed VCS.

I don't think I need to sell the value of DVCS over VCS, but what seems to get lost is that buys you a certain amount of essential complexity, expressed in the CAP theorem and its consequences.

We discussed this deeply on the Fossil forum: https://www.fossil-scm.org/forum/forumpost/2afc32b1ab

We came to no easy answers, because there aren't any. You only get a choice of which problems to accept.

Re:Is Git Irreplaceable? (2019) by ben509 on Wednesday January 08, 2020 @05:01PM (#21996259)
I'm talking about purely advisory locks. Accessing a locked file would let you know who locked it, and if you unlock it, it would just notify them. So it's just a communications mechanism in addition to regular merges.

The alternate method is that locking a file marks you as an interested party to a merge, allowing you to review the correctness of a merge.

This would be purely to avoid changes being lost during merges.