Handling unmergeable files -- a call to arms

[Ewan Milne]

Russel Winder <russel.winder at concertant.com>:

> I definitely need to think about this more.
>
> On the other hand, I can envisage creating a Bazaar plugin to solve the
> original problem without solving these more general problems :-)

I am coming at this with far less knowledge of the Bazaar internal
architecture, essentially as a user. But I think it is worth
reiterating that the original problem is specific to a particular,
centralized, workflow. I believe Russel and I both agree that
providing a file locking mechanism generally in a distributed version
control system is not possible or desirable.

But where Bazaar is being used as a replacement for Subversion, with
bound branches, then the ability to enforce serial updates to files
which are unmergeable is of very real benefit to teams collaborating
on documents. Obviously Bazaar's core aim is (text-based, mergeable)
source control, but a plugin which implements "svn lock" like
behaviour would I'm sure prove very valuable to many teams, and fill a
small but crucial gap in Bazaar's ability to be used as a Subversion
replacement.