[Info-vax] Where to locate software

[Craig A. Berry]

On 6/13/16 8:08 AM, Bob Koehler wrote:
> In article <e2e9f10d-69c0-45b2-9e10-20d111b55592 at googlegroups.com>, lawrencedo99 at gmail.com writes:
>> On Monday, June 13, 2016 at 8:30:04 AM UTC+12, Kerry Main wrote:
>>> Q - perhaps I am really old school, but should not VCS systems have the
>>> capability to prevent code from being updated (read-only) when it is
>>> checked out for update by someone else i.e. similar to document mgmt.
>>> strategies?
>>
>> After many years of experience with this in the real world, it was discovered to a be a very, very bad idea.
>
>    After many years of experience with this in the real world, we found
>    the problems with it were created by inmprper practices put in place
>    by folks who don't know why we have electronic CM tools.

The "D" in DVCS stands for distributed. If you have to wait for someone
else to finish with a file before you can work on it, you're doing the
opposite of distributed development and are defeating concurrency in
your development process. Too much locking increases contention in human
systems as well as software systems. Or, put differently, blocking
people from getting work done isn't such a great idea when getting work
done is important to you.

Not all merges are trivial but many are. Big changes that are likely to
be difficult to merge do need discussion and planning, but better to
communicate by, well, communicating than by locking up the source so no
one else can do anything.