release status - land new features before monday

[Martin Pool]

On 4/12/07, John Arbash Meinel <john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
> At this point, locking 'dirstate' is more of future proofing, because we
> eventually will try to read just portions of the file, rather than
> always reading the whole thing. And that starts to get dicey if the file
> might be changing underneath you.

Is it only future proofing?  I mean, would there be any problems with
two processes running the current code if there are no read locks?

The read lock has some other undesirable effects, like not being able
to diff while a commit is pending.

> So we could just make it so that on win98 we:
>
> 1) Don't lock for reading
> 2) Always read the whole file (disable partial reads).

It would still be possible for a fast writer to update the whole file
while the reader is partway through it, so it's not quite safe, at
least in theory.

> That would probably get things working without running into any data
> loss problems.

-- 
Martin