RE: Per-modules readers/writers ?

[Shankar Unni]

Greg A. Woods wrote:

> Version control is a part of software configuration and 
> change management.  I thought that (what you said) is what
> it (change management) was all about!  ;-)

Argh. I don't think I'm getting my point across, am I?

OK, forget I said "change management". The problem is that I (the
repository administrator) often have *NO CONTROL* over how the system YP
entries and groups are set up, because it's controlled and decided by
some bureaucrats sitting 3000 miles away in an air-conditioned control
room. Worse, it's often some gruesome hack on top of a Windows domain or
something like that..

If this (Unix-level access control) is the only way available for me to
control access to files, I am UNABLE to implement any access control at
all.

Look, we all want to use CVS, because it's free. I agree, we're all
weaselly cheapskates who want everything for nothing :-). I merely
pointed out the "competitive" thingys to make the point that others are
doing this, _because it has been repeatedly asked for_ by customers who
face such problems every day.

What I'm asking is whether anyone is interested in the sort of ACL work
being done on the CVSNT "fork" (about which I asked earlier: has it
truly forked for good, then?), and which I haven't examined in a great
amount of detail yet, but which seems promising.

YES, I understand that its security is not perfect. It's a lot better
than not having any damned control at all. After all, I don't have
hostile hackers roaming the halls and my network trying desperately to
work around the security in CVS. Heck, if I have hostile hackers loose
in my network, I have a address@hidden of more problems than whether they can
read a particular source file..

Or is the philosophical opposition to such grafted-on mechanisms so
great here that no one is ready to even consider any sort of feature in
CVS that might dare whisper of the access control heresy?

(I see a lot of mention of "Unix" this and "Unix" that. Problem is, this
is used in a lot of environments which aren't even Unix. At least, the
clients often aren't Unix. For instance, the most common Java
development configuration out there is a Linux server and Windows
clients, because Sun's JDK on Windows runs rings around Sun's JDK on
Linux and even Solaris. Go figure..)

--
Shankar.