doc/file-conditions
author Paul Crowley <paul@lshift.net>
Sat, 07 Mar 2009 09:31:06 +0000 (2009-03-07)
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FILE CONDITIONS
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Read configuring-access before you read this.
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mercurial-server supports file and branch conditions, which restrict an
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operation depending on what files it modifies and what branch the work is on.
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However, the way these conditions work is subtle and can be counterintuitive -
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if you want to keep things simple, stick to user and repo conditions, and then
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things are likely to work the way you would expect.
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File and branch conditions are added to the conditions against which a rule
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matches, just like user and repo conditions; they have this form:
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    file=<globpattern> - file in the repo
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    branch=<globpattern> - name of the branch
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However, in order to understand what effect adding these conditions will have,
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it helps to understand how and when these rules are applied.
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The rules file is used to make four decisions:
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- Whether to allow a repository to be created
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- Whether to allow access to a repository
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- Whether to allow a changeset on a particular branch at all
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- Whether to allow a changeset to change a particular file
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When the first two of these decisions are being made, nothing is known about
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what files might be changed, and so all file conditions automatically succeed
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for the purpose of such decisions. This means that doing tricky things with
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file conditions can have counterintuitive consequences:
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- You cannot limit read access to a subset of a repository with a "read" rule
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and a file condition: any user who has access to a repository can read all of
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it and its full history. Such a rule can only have the effect of masking a
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later "write" rule, as in this example:
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   read repo=specialrepo file=dontwritethis
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   write repo=specialrepo
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allows all users to read specialrepo, and to write to all files *except* that
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any changeset which writes to "dontwritethis" will be rejected.
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- For similar reasons, don't give "init" rules file conditions.
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- Don't try to deny write access to a particular file on a particular branch -
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a developer can write to the file on another branch and then merge it in.
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Either deny all writes to the branch from that user, or allow them to write to
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all the files they can write to on any branch. In other words, something like
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this will have the intended effect:
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  write user=docs/* branch=docs file=docs/*
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But something like this will not have the intended effect; it will effectively
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allow these users to write to any file on any branch, by writing it to "docs"
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first:
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  write user=docs/* branch=docs
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  write user=docs/* file=docs/*
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  read user=docs/*
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