Re: Proposed patch: allow user to disable lockfile creation

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     These days, advisory file locks (fcntl with F_GETLK and F_SETLK) should be
>     reliable enough over NFS (and on local file systems) on practical GNU and
>     GNU-like machines, and should be able to do everything that Emacs's symlink
>     lock files do.  (This wasn't true way back when the symlink scheme was
>     originally introduced.)  If we used advisory file locks, I daresay we
>     could get rid of those symlinks.
>
> That sounds nice.  If we can do the same job in a way that never
> bothers anyone, let's.

One of the most annoying things most PDF previewers under Windows
exhibit is that they lock the file they are displaying, meaning that
compilations generating PDF files will fail.  The nice way to do this is
to just watch the file and try reloading on redisplay when it has
changed.

Any locking scheme should make sure that it does not interact with other
programs: quite often I start a compilation and continue editing the
file in question, making sure I don't save until the compilation has
finished.

This sort of workflow should continue to be possible.

-- 
David Kastrup