Subversion: The new-generation CVS (DevChannel) [LWN.net]

Subversion: The new-generation CVS (DevChannel)

Posted Jun 3, 2004 22:12 UTC (Thu) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698)
In reply to: Subversion: The new-generation CVS (DevChannel) by piman
Parent article: Subversion: The new-generation CVS (DevChannel)

Per-directory access control in Subversion is not available at all via chown/chmod.

Actually that can be done, if you use svnserve tunnelled through SSH. I had my repositories set up that way for about six months. It works because the svnserve process invoked on the user's behalf runs under his or her user ID.

The preferred approach to access control with Subversion seems to be the use of hook scripts. Some examples hook scripts are provided; they don't implement per-directory access control, but it would not be difficult to set up using the example scripts as a base. In fact, you could easily implement per-file access control, or even more complex policies such aIP address or date restrictions, or checking ACLs in a parallel directory structure.

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Subversion: The new-generation CVS (DevChannel)

Posted Jun 3, 2004 22:14 UTC (Thu) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

I should clarify that my mention of SSH wasn't really per-directory access control within a repository, which does require hook scripts. I meant that I used directory ownership to control access to multiple repositories on the same Subversion server, which is probably not what was wanted.

But it is possible to do this using hook scripts, as I described.