Locking binary files using git version control system

Question

For one and a half years, I have been keeping my eyes on the git community in hopes of making the switch away from SVN. One particular issue holding me back is the inabilit

Answer 1

In response to Mario's additional concern with changes happening in multiple places on the binaries. So the scenario is Alice and Bob are both making changes to the same binary resource at the same time. They each have their own local repo, cloned from one central remote.

This is indeed a potential problem. So Alice finishes first and pushes to the central alice/update branch. Normally when this happens, Alice would make an announcement that it should be reviewed. Bob sees that and reviews it. He can either (1) incorporate those changes himself into his version (branching from alice/update and making his changes to that) or (2) publish his own changes to bob/update. Again, he makes an announcement.

Now, if Alice pushes to master instead, Bob has a dilemma when he pulls master and tries to merge into his local branch. His conflicts with Alice's. But again, the same procedure can apply, just on different branches. And even if Bob ignores all the warnings and commits over Alice's, it's always possible to pull out Alice's commit to fix things. This becomes simply a communication issue.

Since (AFAIK) the Subversion locks are just advisory, an e-mail or instant message could serve the same purpose. But even if you don't do that, Git lets you fix it.

No, there's no locking mechanism per se. But a locking mechanism tends to just be a substitute for good communication. I believe that's why the Git developers haven't added a locking mechanism.