On Tue, 2007-01-02 at 14:17 -0500, Joe Smith wrote: > Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote: > > .... But as you have > > noticed, it does not work out as well when editing shared files. > > Oddly perhaps, Unix has never really provided shared writeable files. > Perhaps there are good theoretical reasons for it; perhaps it was just > one of those simplifying assumptions that Unix was born with, I don't know. > > That's why access to shared writeable resources are controlled by a > server, like CVS or svn or mysql. It's why you don't print using cat > > /dev/lpr. > > People seem to want to do things like this--they keep asking for > applications to mediate between users editing the same file, like > Windows does it, but I wonder if it's such a great idea. > > <Joe > Widnows doesn't do it either, at least not up to XP. There are RCS systems that can run on windows to mediate such development tasks, but natively windows suffers from the same issues of time lag, priority determination, and choosing the latest or most correct of corrections. View how a Wiki evolves to begin to see how this all plays out, or work in a large development task for a while in a team programming environment. My last Windows project involved about 13000 lines of code, 10 engineers in Taiwan, Boston, California, Texas and Japan. The RCS system worked when the server was up (questionable due to growing pains of XP at that time), and when all players knew to check out and check in the files, as well as not rescinding to older revisions without consultation. This is a truley non-trivial task for any really indepth project, and windows doesn't handle it at all. Regards, Les H
