Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!pebbles.bbn.COM!jr
From: jr@pebbles.bbn.COM (John Robinson)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: file locking
Message-ID: <9290.579799021@pebbles>
Date: 16 May 88 15:17:01 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: jr@bbn.com
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 18

The code in filelock.c is nice as far as it goes, but it doesn't
really work out so well in an NFS environment.  You can imagine the
problems: should there be one centralized lock directory across all
file servers?  this hardly works if there are like-named directories
on different machines, and puts one machine at a severe disadvantage
every time an emacs user modifies a buffer.  At the other extreme is
to define PATH_LOCK to be "/tmp/" which only protects you against
yourself or other users of your particular machine.  I don't really
like either of these very much.

So what I would like to know is (1) is it possible to use flock() on
systems that have it to provide at least some of the interlocking?
and/or (2) has anyone come up with a working scheme in NFS (find out
what server has the file you are modifying and go to the PATH_LOCK
directory on that server)?  Other suggestions welcome as well.

/jr
jr@bbn.com or bbn!jr