Re: new authentication mode

[Markus Grabner]

Am Dienstag, 30. Juli 2002 00:12 schrieben Sie:
> >                                                 [...] Our modified CVS
> >server checks for the system password if "+" is given in CVSROOT/passwd
> >instead of the encrypted password
>
> Vielleicht uebersehe ich ja was, aber:
>
> Fuer "echte" Benutzer sind doch gar keine CVSROOT/passwd-Eintraege noetig.
> Die werden ganz normal ueber ihr System-Passwort authentifiziert.
> (Es sei denn, CVSROOT/config sagt:   SystemAuth=No, das ist aber
> eher ungewoehnlich.)
The question was what this is good for since "real" users are authenticated by 
their system password and don't need a CVSROOT/passwd entry.

That's right, but if more persons want to use the same archive and some access 
restrictions should apply on a per-propject basis, the recommended way in CVS 
to do so is to map the CVS user ids of all project membes to a unique system 
user. Currently this also requires to specify a password for each CVS user 
(or omit it to allow the user to access the repository without 
authentication). The new code makes it possible to map user ids (e.g., for 
project management purposes), but still to use system authentication. This 
avoids having to manually update the CVSROOT/passwd file each time a user 
changes its password.
We faced some problems organizing several CVS projects at our site (different 
student classes, research projects etc.). Our first attempt was to use Unix' 
standard user/group management, but this failed since CVS doesn't care about 
group ids (unlike, e.g., Samba, which does a perfect job on this). Indeed, I 
previoulsy intended to implement a Samba-like group management, but since the 
preferred way in CVS is via mapping user ids, I decided to keep it simple and 
just add a small extension to make this feature more useful for our (and 
maybe many others') purpose.

        Regards,
                Markus


-- 
Markus Grabner - Computer Graphics and Vision
Graz University of Technology, Inffeldgasse 16/II, 8010 Graz, Austria
Phone: +43/316/873-5041, Fax: +43/316/873-5050
Email: grabner@icg.tu-graz.ac.at, WWW: http://www.icg.tu-graz.ac.at/~grabner