Administrative database file protection problem

[Dustin Cavanaugh]

My repository is on unix (Sun); the owner is "cvs" and the group is "cvs". 
Whenever a user changes one of the Administrative database files, cvs 
complains of Permission denied. Users (developers) are members of the cvs 
group (though its not their primary group).

I notice that when the database is rebuilt (either by commit or init), all 
the database file protections are reset to -r--r--r--. I then su to cvs, do 
a cvs init, and then manually reset the protections to -rw-rw-r--.

Anybody got a clue to resolving this issue more permanently? Just to make 
matters worse, I'm also going to have to restrict developers to certain 
modules/projects.