RE: access rights to branches

[Andrew Gilmartin]

> Can I restrict her ability to update from
> particular branches or main trunk?

We have a similar issue in that we need to restrict who can update which
files on the mainline and (sometimes branches). There was some discussion of
this recently and the general approach taken was to implement a process that
either passes checkins to a single group or have two copies of your CVS
tree -- build and development -- and migrate revisions from development to
build as authorized. In a large organization with many parallel development
tracks both of these options are not suitable.

What would be useful to us is a pre-commit check that made sure the user can
revise a given file and given branch or mainline. For example,

        # user file                       development-line
        *      #none                      #none
        *      com/mesasys/productA/*     release_4_branch
        asd    com/mesasys/productA/file1
patch_1_branch,patch_2_branch,patch_3_branch
        bnm    com/mesasys/productA/file1 #mainline,patch_*_branch
        cvb    com/mesasys/productA/*     #all

This configuration would give 'asd' access to file1 only for patching, 'bnm'
access to file1 for patching and mainline development, and 'cvb' all access
to all files in all directories on all development lines for productA.
Otherwise all developers can commit changes to release 4 of productA and no
developers can commit other changes elsewhere.

I don't think this can be done currently as the commitinfo handlers you do
not have information about the line of development -- branch or mainline or
revision numbers. If you did then implementing this kind of access would be
straight forward and I think quite valuable. Perhaps we need a commitinfo2
that provides this kind of information on the command line to the commit
handler.

-- Andrew