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possibility to set an "intend-to-edit" flag on a file in Git

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we're evaluating Git to be used in our companies Tool. But a hard requirement is the possibility to set an "intend-to-edit" flag on a file (better path). Notice that I did not use the word "lock"! :-)

One easy implementation might be a special branch "XYZ-locks" that contains an empty blob for every flagged file. So our tool just needs to check, whether a blob exists for the path that's intended to edit, tries to push a commit that touches the file and only allows editing if the push succeeds.

Does anybody have a better idea, maybe with notes?

posted Jul 4, 2013 by anonymous

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1 Answer

+1 vote

In my experience everyone who thinks this is a hard requirement is wrong.

Sure you can implement something to do this, but more likely than not you think you need it because your current centralized SCM does it and you think you can't live without it.

I work with a couple of hundred devs all grinding on the same repository and it's really rare to have:

  • People who edit the same code within each other's pull/push window AND
  • Have the edits to those files not be smoothly resolved by automatic merging (i.e. because it was to completely different parts of the file).

When it does happen every once in a while it's trivial to solve it, you just resolve conflicts, talk to the other guy etc.

Why don't you just start using Git and see if this becomes a practical problem rather than devising some elaborate solution to work around something that probably won't be an issue anyway?

answer Jul 4, 2013 by anonymous
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