Piggy backing on yesterdays post, Ben Collins-Sussman has also announced that the locking branch has been merged into the Subversion repository trunk. This change, which took 4 months of development, implements exclusive locking on files within the repository, a feature requested since pre-1.0.

Ben also references the locking UI specification in his announcement, which is a good primer on what the UI will look like for 1.2 where locking is concerned.

As an aside, the work on locking will close the final hole in support for WebDAV and Autoversioning support. This should allow operating systems that implement DAV support natively (like Web Folders on Windows) to use an HTTP/DAV based repository as a web folder transparently.

The other really cool thing about this implementation that I haven’t seen in others is that you can flag a file with the svn:need-locks property so that it requires the user to lock it before committing it back to the repository. Very cool.