Re: Exclusive File Access

FROM : Michael Norris
DATE : Thu Nov 21 00:21:26 2002

>On Wednesday, Nov 20, 2002, at 20:49 Europe/Prague, Donald Brown wrote:
>
>>  As I think I've said before, you don't do tech support, do you?  This may be
>>  obvious to engineers, but Person A is going to be VERY unhappy because,
>>  without warning, his changes were thrown away.
>
>But hell, it would be *EXACTLY* the same if TextEdit happened to use
>exclusive access (God forbid!), and then A quit TextEdit, somewhat
>later B opened and changed the same file. This problem has *nothing*
>to do with exclusive or non-exclusive access when file is open!
>
>It is about access rights: if you want your changes safe, don't
>allow others to edit your files. That's that, and it's *COMPLETELY*
>*CLEAR* even for my granny (when explained on a simile that anybody
>can rubber out your writing if you let him to play with the paper on
>which you wrote that).

I respectfully disagree. I think it depends on the application. If
you're writing a database, for instance, then standard procedure,
AFAIK, is that you get exclusive access to the record you're
currently editing, but that any number of people can edit the
database at any one time. Only changes to individual records are
'updated', thus meaning that you can't accidentally kill someone
else's changes. (Think of the situation in which an IT Support centre
is using the one database to track all their calls. Thus there could
be 10 people simultaneously editing the database, safe in the
knowledge that they're not going to lose any of their edits. The
worse that will happen is that someone may be disallowed from editing
a particular record temporarily.)

That's an application-level feature, not an 'access rights' feature.

So, in short, it depends.
  -mike
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