leading dot and trailing # in lock files

[Kaganski Mike]

Hi Olivier,

________________________________
От: Olivier Tilloy <olivier.tilloy at canonical.com>
Отправлено: 14 июля 2018 г. 2:47
Кому: mikekaganski at hotmail.com
Копия: libreoffice at lists.freedesktop.org
Тема: Re: leading dot and trailing # in lock files

Thanks Mike for the insights,

My approach of changing the lock filename pattern was indeed naive and
would invalidate the benefits of a cross-applications, cross-versions
lock mechanism.

There's little point in implementing an alternative pattern in cases
where the regular lock file cannot be written, if this isn't
propagated to other office programs and backported to all supported
versions.

Well - I don't agree. Actually, failing to do that would (1) disable our own current and future versions from taking advantages that lock files give: alternative locking where FS locking is unreliable/absent, and information about the party that had opened the document; and (2) disable other suites from catching up. There are cases where lock files aren't needed actually: e.g., WebDAV, where locking is handled by server in a different way. But for cases where such server-side locking and information is unavailable, I'd suggest still use alternative lockfile naming.

Would it be possible instead to write the document itself
and warn the user that no lock file could be written? Or does the
absence of a lock file mean that the file can only be opened
read-only?

We could do this, but see above. Inability to write standard lockfile (when one is absent), while possibility to write lockfile with alternative name is a sure sign that we don't get caught to a situation when we will conflict with other suites, so we are good with the alternative naming. Why not doing that?

--
Best regards,
Mike Kaganski.
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