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 believe that merges are hard (and while we've come a long way, they can be in some circumstances), and you don't have programmers frequently wanting to edit the same file, exclusive locking isn't necessarily that bad.

I wouldn't use them on an open source project, obviously, but in the corporate world where the rules are stricter and you can walk over to a guy and say "can I break your lock?", it gives visibility into what people are working on and avoids conflicts so they don't have to be resolved later.

If two people really need to work on a file at the same time, often you can branch that file, and so long as the tool makes it clear that that branch needs to be merged back in, you can do that and resolve any conflicts then.

That said, I don't think I want to have to work in an exclusive locking world again.