Is there a check out lock in hg ?

[Thomas Arendsen Hein]

* Mike Kupfer <mike.kupfer at sun.com> [20061216 02:43]:
> The RCS model, as you know, is that only one person at a time can edit
> the file.  This works well for situations where the file is checked out
> (locked) for short periods of time.  It doesn't work so well for most
> software development environments.  If your files are locked for only
> short periods of time, I'd have to wonder if Mercurial is really the
> right SCM for you.

We still use RCS for things like writing offers to clients, where
usually only one person edits the .tex file, then asks a second
person to review the document before being sent out to the client.

These documents live in group-writable directories associated with
the client, not with the person editing it, so creating a clone in
the user's home directory seems too much overhead.

So yes, we don't need all the distributed stuff from Mercurial, but
even for such simple things Mercurial is easier to use:

Some examples commands for a single-file "project":
 hg log                     rlog foo.tex
 hg export 3                rlog -r1.3 foo.tex; rcsdiff -ur1.2 -r1.3 foo.tex
 hg annotate foo.tex        ???
 hg tag delivered-YYYYMMDD  cp -a . ../delivered-YYYYMMDD

If we have a second file things are getting worse.

And we still have the flexibility to clone the repo to a laptop in
case someone has to continue editing the offer on the train.

So why not use Mercurial here? We even started using it without
locking, because our editors warn us if we're trying to edit the
same file (vim vs. vim) or are about to overwrite someone else's
changes (vim vs. emacs).

Thomas

-- 
Email: thomas at intevation.de
http://intevation.de/~thomas/