Handling unmergeable files -- a call to arms

[Russel Winder]

Some time ago I raised the issue of a workflow of joint authoring using
unmergeable files (cf. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr/+bug/109730).  The
context is using Bazaar as a drop-in replacement for Subversion as a
centralized versioned filestore where the files being stored are word
processor (OpenOffice.org) or DTP (FrameMaker) files -- which are
completely unmergeable.

This requires absolute serialization of write access.

CVS has per file locking so this no problem.  Subversion did not have
per file locking originally but introduced it more or less exactly to
deal with this problem of shared access to unmergeable files.  As far as
I am aware Bazaar has no support for this workflow.

Martin has always agreed that it is a problem, that Bazaar should have a
facility to deal with, but that there was no core team resource to be
able to look at it.

For myself the priority of this issue went down when I switched back to
LaTeX from FrameMaker for most of my authoring.  We also stayed with
Subversion for general work because the Bazaar GUI tools are not good
enough for general use (the Subversion tools are not great but they are
significantly better than the Bazaar ones).

However, and increasing number of people are beginning to use Bazaar as
a replacement for Subversion.  Increasingly the issue of GUI tools is
going to become more important than speed or efficiency, and the issue
of serialization of write access to unmergeable files is going to become
something that is supported by having per file locking in some form or
other.

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.
-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      Partner
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