Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ulowell!apollo!nazgul
From: nazgul@apollo.COM (Kee Hinckley)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: multi-user editors???
Message-ID: <42da33a8.1b147@apollo.COM>
Date: 26 Apr 89 00:10:00 GMT
References: <8531@xanth.cs.odu.edu> <8460001@hpwrce.HP.COM>
Reply-To: nazgul@apollo.COM (Kee Hinckley)
Organization: Apollo Computer, Chelmsford, MA
Lines: 29

In article <8460001@hpwrce.HP.COM> howeird@hpwrce.HP.COM (Howard Stateman) writes:
>>Do any of y'all know of any full-screen editors that support multiple 
>>users editing a single file at one time???  
>  >Keith E. Lazarus                     Department of Computer Science
>
>Uh. I'm curious. Why would you WANT more than one person editing the
>same file at the same time? How would you keep someone from changing
>the same information that another is changing? Who gets the last change?
>

Stop thinking programming languages.  Think things like bugs files, where
people can be adding bugs, updating existings ones, etc..  Think of
interactive editing where I'm adding text and someone else is working
on another part, or commenting on what I'm doing (much more efficient
than having them stand over my shoulder and trying to tell me what to
type).  Lots of documentation may be the product of more than one
person, or would be if it were possible to do this simply.  Clearly
you need to handle locking, and deal with what happens if two users
try and modify the same thing, a SMOP.  If DBase allows multiple 
users, and doesn't lock then I say it's broken.  Unix has dones this
for years with files, and it's broken too :-).  File/Record locking
is really mandatory for a consistant multi-user system.

						-nazgul
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I'm not sure which upsets me more; that people are so unwilling to accept       responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate     everyone else's.