I'd be more inclined to disable locks; they don't seem particularly desirable. :P

Looks like either way will take a pre-lock hook script?

Don't mind which one is chosen. No locks, means no surprises. Commit mail with locks enabled means one could have known.

Recently Tim locked something in SecurePoll, and I locked something in Collection. I accidentally ran into Tim's lock fixing an i18n issue. I later heard he had announced it on either wikitech.wikimedia.org or MediaWiki-General. I lifted my locks, not certain if Tim has lifted his.

I've just checked and nobody has any open locks right now on the repository. I'm with Brion in saying just disable locks entirely.

ayg wrote:

I'm also fine with just disabling locks, if that's possible. Locking is a surprising feature to me, it's used so uncommonly that it will inevitably cause gotchas.

Have edited the pre-lock and pre-unlock hooks to both return 1, blocking the transaction. Locking is no longer a problem.