Concurrent access on do-files

[David Kantor]

Hello,
I've not been watching this forum lately, so I don't know if this has been discussed.

My organization has Stata 16 MP on a (WIndows) server that is accessed by multiple users. Sometimes more than one user edits the same do-file concurrently. As expected, when one user saves the file, the other person's edits get overwritten. Thus, there is a need to control or prevent concurrent access. Does anyone know of a way to handle this?

I note that this is the same situation that existed long ago, not in Stata, but in general computing, before personal computers, when there was a single computer that many users accessed. We either...
A, communicated with each other about who was working on what file, or
B, used a code management system that lets only one user have access to any particular file at a time.

I also note that, for products such as Excel, multiple users may access a file, but only one has write access. But that was produced by MS, who also created the operating system, so they can readily build such a feature into their products.
.
So, can anyone suggest how to handle this situation? Is there a Stata feature that I'm not aware of? Is there a separate product available -- a code management system -- that someone could recommend?

Or do we just try hard to communicate among ourselves.

Thanks
--David

[Leonardo Guizzetti]

Concurrent file access is always a pain on any operating system because of the problem of collisions that you have just described. To my knowledge there is no built-in option that comes with any modern operating systems, so you will have to turn to third-party tools (or a cumbersome communication process).

One way to do this is by using Git, which will allow version control, but importantly can be configured to make your server the master/official reposity, and each user can clone that repository, work on it, push those changes to the server and then those changes can be moderated and accepted. Since this tool comes from the realm of computer science and engineering, it's naturally able to handle this concurrent access problem. In this case, the problem is sode-stepped by having "working" copies and a "source" copy.

[Sergiy Radyakin]

Any of the popular VCSs (Version Control Systems) should be able to solve this: Git, Mercurial, SVN, Bazaar,...
I, personally, preferred Mercurial, but Git is most actively popularized now. .
A free and comprehensive book https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2 will get you started.

[David Kantor]

Thank you to Leonardo and Sergiy for those suggestions.