Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Re: savannah shell access?

[Sylvain Beucler]

On Sat, Jan 06, 2007 at 02:01:59PM +0100, Jim Meyering wrote:
> Sylvain Beucler <address@hidden> wrote:
> ...
> >> In order to set up a git->cvs mirror, I need to maintain a
> >> cvs-checked-out copy of the coreutils module (eventually gnulib, too).
> >> It must be accessible by the git update hook, to be used whenever
> >> someone does a "git-push" to sv.gnu.org.
> >>
> >> For now, I'm using /var/tmp/git-to-cvs, but it's trivial to change.
> >
> > I think that depends how your hooks depend on it:
> >
> > - if they recreate it as needed, /var/tmp sound good. Maybe /tmp is
> > better because it's in ramfs
> >
> > - if they can't recreate it, maybe we need to place it somewhere that
> > is backed-up (/var/lib/git/sthing),
> 
> It's easy to recreate.  Just check out from cvs.
> 
> The hook could theoretically check out a copy of the cvs module for each
> git push, apply and commit the pushed change sets, and then remove it
> when done.  However, I've preferred to maintain a clean, checked-out
> directory in a known location and use that.  Far less overhead.
> 
> > - or maybe we need to recreate/repopulate the directories at boot time
> > (like the cvs locks dirs)

I agree the working copy should not be created and deleted each time
for efficiency.

>From a security pov, there's a place where people need to put their
files so that other projects/hooks cannot alter them. So I think the
working directories (at least the top-level directory) need to be
pre-created.

FHS doesn't garantee that files in /var/tmp so following this view
this means pre-created dirs need to be placed in /var/lib.


Thus /var/lib/git/cvs-to-git/ and /var/lib/git/cvs-to-git/projectname
would need to be created at project creation time.


Maybe this security is too tight and cumbersome. If there's no risk
when a project messes another project's working copy or pre-creates it
with different permissions, then we can use something like /var/lock
(1777) and let the hook create git-to-cvs/ and git-to-cvs/project on
the fly when missing. In which case /var/tmp would be a good location.


That's the 2 solutions I see. Do you think there's a risk with the
first one? Since this can be a reusable setup, assume users may have
local access.

-- 
Sylvain