I'm talking about purely advisory locks. Accessing a locked file would let you know who locked it, and if you unlock it, it would just notify them. So it's just

I'm talking about purely advisory locks. Accessing a locked file would let you know who locked it, and if you unlock it, it would just notify them. So it's just a communications mechanism in addition to regular merges. The alternate method is that locking a file marks you as an interested party to a merge, allowing you to review the correctness of a merge. This would be purely to avoid changes being lost during merges.