Equivalent to SVN lock

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Lionel Dricot wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Here at work, we have a big binary file (shame on us, it's an Excel
> file) that should be regularly updated by some people.
> 
> This file is on a SVN repository and, in order to avoid conflict, we use
> svn lock feature :
> http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.2/svn.ref.svn.c.lock.html
> 
> The workflow is then :
> 
> svn update
> svn lock xls file
> update the file
> svn commit
> svn unlock
> 
> 
> Is there any equivalent in Bzr (I didn't found one) or any workflow that
> would allow us to edit the file ?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Lionel

With a distributed system, it is generally very difficult to impossible
to do this. Considering that you can commit offline with no network
connection at all, there is no way to enforce the "file lock".

However, if working in the "centralized" workflow, where everyone has a
light/heavy checkout then something like that *could* be supported.

At the moment, we don't have anything to allow that. I *will* note that
if you are using a centralized workflow, when you go to commit, it will
fail because the branch is out of date. But when you do "bzr update" it
will cause a conflict in the file (as opposed to telling people in
advance that they just have to wait to edit that file).

I could certainly see doing something like this with an out-of-band
communication, and having a plugin that would add lock/unlock commands.

As an aside, does Excel support merging 2 spreadsheets? I know Word has
decent support for merging two copies of a document, but I don't know if
they tried to do any of that in Excel.

John
=:->
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