On 12/14/2011 2:59 PM, John Andersen wrote:
On 12/14/2011 11:37 AM, Brian K. White wrote:
On 12/14/2011 1:22 PM, lynn wrote:
Hi When I open a libreoffice document from on our LAN, a lockfile is produced which prevents anyone opening a second writable copy. It works fine, with Libre and Microsoft office lockfiles being mutually respected. If however, I open a document from my Dropbox folder, the lockfile which is produced is not transferred to the cloud.
I am unable to get beyond sales staff at Dropbox who point me to 3rd party solutions (none is available for Linux), workarounds, or tell me that file locking may be implemented in the future.
What is different about a lockfile that distinguishes it from all the other files which Dropbox sync? (Others have mentioned that they are hidden or/[and therefore] may not be transferable to cloud file systems. Hidden text files synchronise OK though, and we have ext4, nfs, samba and ntfs working together fine here.)
Confused. L x
A file-lock is not a lock-file.
File locking and lock files are entirely entirely entirely different things.
google "file locks" and "lock files"
The answer is pretty much what they tried to tell you, dropbox doesn't support file locking (which is no great failing btw, file locking is hard over a network and especially so over the (slow) internet, and insanely so over something like dropbox that never claimed to be a real full network filesystem but more like a "more convenient than ftp folder".
So you can simply "don't do that" or you can try various extra kludges to try to layer another filesystem on top of dropbox.
You are basically expecting something you have no right to expect. If you need a real network filesystem then use a real network filesystem.
An excellent rant, but most of it is totally wrong.
Not wrong at all on any points. The fact that libreoffice does also write lockfiles in no way invalidates anything I said, nor did anything you said, and you are simply wrong that file locking over networks is even a fully solved problem yet, let alone an easy one, let alone over slow/intermittent wan networks, let alone in a cross-platform or platform-less environment like dropbox where the very concept/definition of a lock differs from one client to another. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org