intend-to-edit flag

Hi,

we're evaluating Git to be used in our companies Tool. But a hard requirement is the possibility to set an "intend-to-edit" flag on a file (better path). Notice that I did not use the word "lock"! :-)

One easy implementation might be a special branch "XYZ-locks" that contains an empty blob for every flagged file. So our tool just needs to check, whether a blob exists for the path that's intended to edit, tries to push a commit that touches the file and only allows editing if the push succeeds.

Does anybody have a better idea, maybe with notes?

Thank you,

Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro