Handling unmergeable files -- a call to arms

[Russel Winder]

Martin,

On Fri, 2009-05-29 at 09:26 +0200, Martin Pool wrote:
> Hi Russel,
> 
> > The core team still have higher priorities than this, so it is really up
> > to others in the Bazaar community to become involved.
> >
> > My thinking is that we can have a short debate on the list, leading to a
> > group of people splitting off using some mechanism or other, so as to
> > come up with ideas and prototypes that can be submitted to the core team
> > for review.
> 
> It's fine for the discussion to happen on this list, and I suspect
> lots of people working on other things will participate in the
> threads.  It's just that until we've got through more of the things on
> the core plan, like shipping 2.0, nested trees, and the user model
> cleanup, we won't spend much time directly coding on it.

Understood.  There are priorities, and I don't think they are wrong, it
would just be good to get some traction on these non-core problems that
are beginning to irritate more than just me.

> Here are two possible ways forward:
> 
>  * write a science-fiction user manual for how you'd really like it to work

Certainly there needs to be a proposal that is better detailed than the
various emails that have happened to date.  I guess the way forward is
to start a wiki page somewhere so that once started others can
contribute.

>  * write a plugin that does the simplest thing that could possibly
> work (tm) - maybe keeping a list in ~/.bazaar/ of locked files, and
> sending mail when a lock is taken or released - or maybe committing to
> this list in a centralized branch

Clearly going for a plugin is the right direction.  Once things kick off
with actual code there needs to be a project with branch(es) on
Launchpad.

The crucial factor is whether it is possible to intercept all write
requests to a branch.  If it is possible, then creating a
capability/lock system is entirely feasible.  As you say maintain a list
of currently locked files and disallow write access to that file unless
the request comes from the owner of the lock.

-- 
Russel.
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Dr Russel Winder      Partner
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