Pull / push locking - does it have any happy users, or can we drop it?

[Mads Kiilerich]

Hi

Kallithea has some inherited "locking" functionality. Something where a 
"pull" from the repository will lock it, so nobody else can push until 
the user that pulled has pushed again.

There are good use cases for file locking - especially if tracking 
unmergeable files like binary assets. But the current Kallithea doesn't 
seem like a good way to do it:

Locking of the whole repository is too coarse, and triggering it as a 
side effect of pull/push makes the work flows fragile and inflexible.

More important for me right now: The implementation is hard to maintain 
and also makes it harder to maintain other parts. It is quite invasive 
and fragile and seems buggy ... and is hard to clean up and fix.

I would thus prefer to drop the existing locking functionality. I think 
Kallithea would be better without it. If we want something in this 
direction, I think it would be easier to start from scratch than to 
maintain and evolve what we have now. Any needs for "locking" is 
probably currently better solved by adjusting access control or making 
custom hooks.

Are there any happy users of the current locking functionality that 
would miss it? Can you say more about the use case and how will it works?

/Mads