Use advisory locks? Or no locks?

My intuition is that if you want to implement a transactional database on top of these primitives, then the mandatory locking is just going to get in the way. You do need some kind of synchronisation primitive between your readers and writers, but possibly something bespoke to your application.

There is some question of whether mandatory file locking is ever a good idea. [This document from the kernel sources](https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/mandatory-locking.txt) comes to mind but I'm sure there are more relevant sources.

Start by reading the linked kernel mandatory-locking document and the repository's database or storage entry points, if any. The issue does not name files, tests, or a concrete behavior, so an implementation cannot be considered done until the locking approach and acceptance criteria are decided.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.