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  • From: Arjan Bouter <abouter AT sourcemage.org>
  • To: Andrew Stitt <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>
  • Cc: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] restricting access to important spells
  • Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2006 17:57:55 +0200

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On Thu, 13 Jul 2006 08:24:22 -0700
Andrew Stitt <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 11:39:16AM +0200, Arjan Bouter wrote:
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> > In the last couple of weeks it happened a few times that important spells
> > like linux-pam and shadow got broken by updated spells. Needless to say
> > it's annoying when I've got to fix a spell just to be allowed access to
> > my own box...
> >
> > Mathieu (lejatorn) and I were talking on #sourcemage about restricting
> > access to certain important spells to
> > component leads and a few selected devs chosen by those leads.
> > We think anything related to boot/login should get on that list of spells.
> >
> > Any thoughts on this?
> >
>
> Why wasn't this caught through the smcommits review mailing list? (Im
> asking somewhat rhetorically).
>
> I agree that inexperienced gurus should not be working on core spells such
> as ncurses, or shadow (as examples). Enforcing that through technology as
> a first step would be a mistake. I think restrictions are better handled by
> a social layer. For example, make it more clear to new gurus "do not mess
> with base spells directly in test, no matter how trivial your changes".

Catching this with a social layer would require these spells to be clearly
marked as being special.

On IRC I said I'd volunteer as maintainer of the linux-pam spell, would just
adding a MAINTAINER= line to the DETAILS file be enough to warn people that
they shouldn't "mess with it" as you put it?

>
> We can always spend more time reviewing changes. maybe make it easier to
> filter emails based on where the changes occurred. So those of us with
> less time to review everything can find the important stuff more easily.

Marking those commits would help a lot in allowing people with limited time
(such as myself) to focus on reviewing them.

>
> Another approach, maybe for down the road, is to have more of a
> distributed hierarchical development structure akin to the linux kernel
> community. We sort of have that with the apprentice program, but haven't
> reached a big enough mass for that to be the norm.
>
> --
> _________________________________________________________________________
> | Andrew D. Stitt | acedit at armory.com | astitt at sourcemage.org |
> | irc: afrayedknot | Sorcery Team Lead | ftp://t.armory.com/ |
> | 1024D/D39B096C | 76E4 728A 04EE 62B2 A09A 96D7 4D9E 239B D39B 096C |
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>

Arjan Bouter

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