Subversion considered obsolete

But the thing is that there is no point in working on a part when someone else is working on it, because merging the results is harder than just starting over. I've dealt with situations where every time a hardware schematic changed, the engineer had to spend half a day rerouting the traces so they would fit, and if two people changed the schematic at the same time and rerouted the traces, neither of their layouts would be helpful in routing the merged schematics. Your version control system can't solve problems that your development environment can't solve, and the solution is to have locks such that the second engineer can work on something else instead of spending a day on work that doesn't contribute to the final result.