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

This is not a solution but rather a comment on why locking mechanisms are needed. There are some tools used in some fields which use binary only formats which are flat out mission critical and the "use better/different tools" is just not an option. There are no viable alternate tools. The ones I'm familiar with really wouldn't be candidates for merging even if you stored the same information in an ascii format. One objection I've heard is that you want to be able to work offline. The particular tool I'm thinking of really doesn't work offline anyway because of needing to pull licenses so if I have data on a laptop it isn't like I can run the tool while on a train anyway. That said, what git does provide if I have a slow connection, I can get licenses and also pull down changes but have the fast local copy for looking at different versions. That is a nice thing that the DVCS gives you even in this case.

One view point is that git is simply not the tool to use but it is nice for all the text files which are also managed with it and it is annoying to need different version control tools for different files.

The sort-of-advisory-locking-via-mail approach really stinks. I've seen that and have been tired of an endless stream of emails of "I'm editing it" "I'm done editing" and seen changes lost because of it. The particular case I'm thinking of was one where a collection of smaller ascii files would have been much nicer but that is an aside.