Re: [Monotone-devel] Google Summer of Code 2006

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 09:54:17AM -0500, Chad Walstrom wrote:
> There's been a lot of talk lately on the address@hidden list
> about this.  Currently, Savannah offers CVS and GNU Arch, but
> obviously people want to run their favorite SCM's to work on their
> projects.  Subversion has come up in the discussion (with some loud
> approval), and I dropped the Monotone with usher suggestion into the
> fray.

My _guess_ is that it would be a little more prudent on our part to
start up our own small hosting environment first.  Timothy has done
awesome work here; I think(?) all we actually need is a server to host
things on.  That way we can do the shake-down ourselves, and find
whatever problems there are :-).

But, hey, if the Savannah folks actually are interested in this (I
think the privilege separation tweaks would be really easy, see
below), and want to explore things more, that'd be cool too.  I can't
tell from your message how much actual interest there is.

> It was rejected on the issue of security, that if usher were allowed
> to launch 'mtn serve' instances, they would be required to share the
> same system user/group permissions.  A single compromised usher
> instance would then give unmitigated access to each of the services it
> started.  The alternative I proposed was to manage the 'mtn serve'
> instances separately, then use usher to proxy.

If I were writing usher, I'd have just used Twisted; it has such rich
networking and process support that the whole functionality would be
like 1 page of code, easy to read, no buffer overruns :-).  If anyone
wanted to implement a new usher proxy with whatever fancy features, it
really could be an afternoon of work; usher is _very_ simple.

-- Nathaniel

-- 
"But in Middle-earth, the distinct accusative case disappeared from
the speech of the Noldor (such things happen when you are busy
fighting Orcs, Balrogs, and Dragons)."