Revision control locking: Is the jury still out?

Question

When I\'m online it seems that everyone has agreed that using the exclusive locking workflow in source control is a Bad Thing. All the new revision control systems I see app

Answer 1

If you're used to exclusive locking, then it's hard to embrace the edit-merge workflow.

Exclusive locking has its benefits, especially for binary files (images, videos, ...) which can't be merged automatically or not at all.

But: the need for exclusive locking always indicates another problem: good communication between people working on the project. Exclusive locking provides a poor replacement: it tells users that someone else is already working on that particular file - something they should know without using a version control system.

Since there are better ways to help with the communication among team members, most (all?) version control systems don't implement exclusive locking anymore or just a reduced version (i.e., locking, but such that those locks are not enforced).

It's not the job of a version control system to help with the communication.