Re: outsider's perspective

[Paul Sander]

>--- Forwarded mail from address@hidden

>On Tue, 27 May 2003, Greg A. Woods wrote:

>> No concurrent versioning system with a shared repository, and
>> particularly not one that can operate in a client/server mode, can ever
>> possibly make any use of ownership, nor even of most permissions bits.
>> Ownership information, and most permissions bits, "MUST" always be
>> specific to the client and it MUST NOT be dictated by the repository.

>I agree. By definition, nobody should ``own'' any file in a project.
>Files are there so they can be shared and worked on by many people.
>In version control, access control makes sense at the granularity of a
>whole project: who gets read access to the whole thing, and who gets
>read-write.  A versioned tree is effectively one object.

Many large projects divvy up the code among many developers and prefer
to limit write access to specific areas of the repository to specific
users authorized to work on that specific code.  Sometimes they also
globally deny write access to other users, and globally deny all access
to still other users.  CVS permits this to a degree by using filesystem
access permissions in the repository.

Many small projects don't want to think about access control, so giving
users global read or write access to the repository is adequate for their
needs.

I've supported both environments with CVS.

>--- End of forwarded message from address@hidden