> Did they ever get over the idea that a version control system should try to prevent two people from modifying (or "checking out") a file at the same time? Ch

> Did they ever get over the idea that a version control system should try to prevent two people from modifying (or "checking out") a file at the same time? Checking out is still a fundamental concept of perforce, and it's the reason it's so fast. Not all files need exclusive locks, that's usually reserved for binary assets (and is a selling point of perforce as it prevents an unsolvable merge conflict later on). When I started using perforce 13 years ago, every editor I used had either a perforce plugin, or an option to "checkout on edit or save", > Oh, and cloning a repo so you have a second copy of it for an experiment took ages because you couldn't just 'cp -a' the directory, you had to "enlist" in all the files with the server... I don't really see the problem. doing `cp -a` on a large git repo can be an extra 30GB if not more on disk. The tradeoff of a very uncommon operation (duplicating a repo for an experiment sounds like a great use for shelves in p4, or branches in git) taking longer for performance on the golden path seems like a really good one to me.