Access controls...

[John Szakmeister]

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 2:26 PM, Maritza Mendez <martitzam at gmail.com> wrote:
> Catching up on email between flights...
>
> Bzr is billed as "adaptive" and my experience using bzr in a
> commercial environment required me to adapt to bzr a little more than
> I hoped.

Same here.

> Like it or not access control is a big deal in the enterprise.  There
> are modules related to product licensing or "secret sause" that
> executives demand restricted access.  Sometimes they are silly.  But
> they write the paychecks.  This poses a challenge for any system which
> does not use a server protocol and most dvcs in general.  My solution
> has been to design repos around security requirements and then set up
> ntfs permissions accordingly.  This wastes some disk but it works and
> I can tell my boss that the secret stuff is locked up safe.

That's definitely one way to go about it.  My hope is to have
something that can scale to several hundred developers though and they
don't have access to shared drives between them.

FWIW, I do plan on releasing what I've done back into the community.
And I hope to document all the nuances of making things work with
access controls.

> Anything which makes flexible access controls easy to set up *and*
> easy to verify will facilitate enterprise adoption of bzr.

Agreed.  I hope to make some headway on that, but it's going to take a
little time to flush out all the niggles.

-John