Hey, We're scripting around Knot, and for that we pipe sequences of commands to knotc. We're running into a few wishes for improved rigour that look like they are generic: 1. WAITING FOR TRANSACTION LOCKS This would make our scripts more reliably, especially when we need to do manual operations on the command line as well. There should be no hurry for detecting lock freeing operations immediately, so retries with exponential backoff would be quite alright for us. Deadlocks are an issue when these are nested, so this would at best be an option to knotc, but many applications call for a single level and these could benefit from the added sureness of holding the lock. 2. FAILING ON PARTIAL OPERATIONS When we script a *-begin, act1, act2, *-commit, and pipe it into knotc it is not possible to see intermediate results. This could be solved when any failures (including for non-locking *-begin) would *-abort and return a suitable exit code. Only success in *-commit would exit(0) and that would allow us to detect overall success. We've considered making a wrapper around knotc, but that might actually reduce its quality and stability, so instead we now propose these features. Just let me know if you'd like to see the above as a patch (and a repo to use for it). Cheers, -Rick