Ah, this is why you have a bad attitude about the “D” part of “DVCS”, right? The workflow for art is “I need to lock that graphics asset so that no one else edits it while I’m editing it,” which you can’t do with a DVCS. Disallowing exclusive edits is generally what most programming teams want; otherwise it’s a daily occurrence to try to get someone to unlock a file they locked for editing and forgot about.
Not really. Locking of binary assets is a separate topic I’ve ignored.
I don’t actually like or dislike the “distributed” part. I don’t care about it. At all. In the slightest. Almost all projects are defacto centralized. If decentralization was free then great, more features for free.
My experience is that distributed is not free. It appears to me to be a fatal flaw that prevents Git from ever being a good tool for large projects with large binary assets, such as games. So I would sacrifice it in a heartbeat IF it gave me the features I do care about.
Locking is just punting on the problem. If a version control system can't merge non-conflicting changes to the same file by different people, that file is unmaintainable and shouldn't have been checked in as if it were source code. Instead it should be generated from a set of files that can be edited normally.
