@grumpygamer File locking has its use-cases, but it goes completely against the idea of DVCS. I don't think there's a place for it in Git, it feels like something best done in a layer on top of a VCS.
@Hyperlynx ...which is exactly why there's no place for it in Git, or any other DVCS for that matter. It should be built on top, because it's a completely separate problem to what distributed version control systems concern themselves with. Git does not offer any primitives that could be helpful in implementing it at all, it's just not the place to handle it.
@dos oh, I see what you're getting at. Yeah, maybe so.
@dos @grumpygamer 20+ years ago, we worked on a shared machine via SSH and did pessimistic file locking via the company IRC channel :-D "I'm working on index.php!"
@dos maybe, but these systems were designed to handle text, not binary data. And text is fundamentally mergeable while art assets often aren't.
File locking isn't ideal, but it is a fix for the problem of two people working on the same non-text files.