Where I work, we branch for every bugfix, to allow a "clean" trunk at all times.
Some files we work with are not easily merged, so we have svn:needs-lock set on them. Locking one of these files is supposed to indicate to the rest of the team not to touch it until you're done (or at least, ask first). But since the lock is on a branch, somebody else on a different branch, or even merging back to trunk, will have no way to know you are editing the file. I wanted to solve this using a pre-lock hook on the server, which would automatically try to lock the trunk version of an artifact when somebody locks on a branch. But, since locking requires a username and password, and hook scripts do not have access to that information, the best I could do is deny the lock if the trunk is not locked, and also if the existing trunk lock does not contain the branch name in the lock comment. I might be able to get a special user added, with a password that never expires, which the hook script could use with a hard-coded password to create the trunk lock. Is there a nicer way to create a trunk lock from the hook script? I don't know if "the powers that be" will approve of a special user for this purpose. Or perhaps an alternate solution to allow branch locks to actually be useful? I sold the team on a pre-lock hook in the first place with the idea that it could be fully automated, I'll need to sell them again if there is an extra manual step in there. Most of us use the TortoiseSVN GUI rather than command-line tools, so a simple wrapper script to invoke instead of using "svn lock" directly isn't a very nice option either.
