Bazaar dirstate locking (was: lock_* API change)

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eli Zaretskii writes:
 > > From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org>
 > > Cc: robertc at robertcollins.net,
 > >     bazaar at lists.canonical.com,
 > >     monnier at iro.umontreal.ca
 > > Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 22:52:15 +0900
 > > 
 > > Who's talking about VC?  I'm talking about Just Plain Scripting:
 > > 
 > > (defun bzr-commit-in-background ()

 > And this is different from what I do now (run bzr outside Emacs) in
 > what ways?

It allows you to streamline the workflow without switching from Emacs.
Most Emacs developers value that, as you know.  I'm surprised that you
place so little weight on it.

 > > As for the other claims you make, I'm not an expert on bzr internals,
 > > I just know enough about databases that it seemed plausible to me that
 > > a lock might be needed in the current design.
 >
 > Sounds like we are in agreement here: this should be fixed.  A few
 > mails back, it sounded like you are blaming me (or Emacs) for using a
 > wrong workflow.

No, we're not in full agreement about anything except that bugs should
be fixed.  I don't have an opinion on whether this issue is a bug or
an unfortunate side-effect of a feature -- my personal workflows
simply don't care.  Balancing development effort against user value I
leave up to Robert and company.

And I did then and still do think that the workflow that several
people, starting with RMS and including you and Óscar, have advocated
is an abuse of a DVCS.  Certainly, bound branches and lightweight
checkouts are convenient for some purposes, especially so for testers
and casual developers, and can be useful as a component of an overall
workflow.  However, there are certain necessary limitations in a
distributed data base.  I expect (both in a "should" sense and based
on Bazaar history) that the Bazaar developers will make efforts to
reduce the limitations to those necessary ones -- but I don't expect
that will make workflows based on commit and other operations taking
minutes turn into good ones for mission-critical parts of the overall
workflow.