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> From: cvsnt-bounces at cvsnt.org > [mailto:cvsnt-bounces at cvsnt.org] On Behalf Of Tony Hoyle > Sent: Wednesday, 07 June, 2006 10:38 > > OTOH most SCM's don't have the branch/merge capability that CVS has > (hence the whole reserved/locking paradigm that still sticks around so > much - they can't merge so you have to stop other people working on the > files). While I'm generally in agreement with you in this thread, I don't think this is accurate. Certainly RCS and its descendants and clones (such as PVCS) all offer branching and merging. RCS used (but did not enforce) a locking paradigm because Walter Tichy was trying to build a better SCCS, and SCCS used a locking paradigm. But it's certainly possible to use RCS with a merge paradigm (concurrent updates) rather than a lock paradigm (serialized updates). Of course that's just what CVS originally was: RCS without bothering to lock files, and merging when more than one set of changes was applied to a given revision. In other words, it wasn't the introduction of branch/merge capability that changed the paradigm from locking and exclusive updates to lockless concurrent ones. That capability already existed; what changed was that people realized that merging was sufficiently robust and conflicts (and hence manual intervention) sufficiently rare to make concurrent updates feasible. -- Michael Wojcik Principal Software Systems Developer, Micro Focus