> CRDT picks 2

They don’t have to.

The crdt library knows that value is in conflict, and it decides what to do about it. Most CRDTs are built for realtime collab editing, where picking an answer is an acceptable choice. But the crdt can instead add conflict marks and make the user decide.

Conflicts are harder for a crdt library to deal with - because you need to keep merging and growing a conflict range. And do that in a way that converges no matter the order of operations you visit. But it’s a very tractable problem - someone’s just gotta figure out the semantics of conflicts in a consistent way and code it up. And put a decent UI on top.

For that you need a very centralized VCS, not a decentralized one. Perforce allows you to lock a file so everybody else cannot make edits to it. If they implemented more fine-grained locking within files, or added warnings to other users trying to check them out for edits, they'd be just where you want a VCS to be.

How, or better yet, why would Git warn you about a potential conflict beforehand, when the use case is that everyone has a local clone of the repo and might be driving it towards different directions? You are just supposed to pull commits from someone's local branch or push towards one, hence the wording. The fact that it makes sense to cooperate and work on the same direction, to avoid friction and pain, is just a natural accident that grows from the humans using it, but is not something ingrained in the design of the tool.

We're collectively just using Git for the silliest and simplest subset of its possibilities -a VCS with a central source of truth-, while bearing the burden of complexity that comes with a tool designed for distributed workloads.

I haven't used them, but doesn't SVN or Mercurial do something like this? It blocks people from working on a file by locking them, the problem is that in large teams there are legitimate reasons for multiple people to be working on the same files, especially something like a large i18n file or whatever.

> It would be incredibly useful if before you were about to edit a file, the version control system would warn you that someone else has made changes to it already or are actively working on it. In large teams, this sort of automation would reduce conflicts, as long as humans agree to not touch the same file. This would also reduce the amount of quality regressions that result from bad conflict resolutions.

Bringing me back to my VSS days (and I'd much rather you didn't)

well, the mismatch here is widened by the fact that almost everyone it seems uses git with a central, prominent, visible, remote repository. Where as git was developed with the a true distributed vision. Now sure that truely distributed thing only becomes final when it reaches some 'central' repo, but it's quite a big different than we all do.