CVS/SSH level of security using perforce ?

[ScottBlachowiczsab at seanet.com]

> > Just wondering...can you do user-level access controls with something
> > like the tcp_wrappers on the server machine? ...
>
> Doesn't this strike you as a hell of a lot of work for something that is
> provided in other SCM systems already ? It appears that I've opened up a
> larger can of worms than I realized with this one.

Yes.  I started that message before I realized how involved it could get...

> Even if it didn't have encryption, just making the p4 command prompt for a
> password and check it against a hashed version in the protect table seems to
> be a trivial excercise.

I would think so.  Wouldn't it make more sense to have the password for a user
be in their 'p4 user' form?  Then you need the old password to change it or
you need 'super' permissions to change it.  The latter would mean that the 'p4
user' command should be able to write specs for some other user (only if the
"current" user has super perms).  That way a user doesn't need to get
administrator help just to change his own password.

Also, I assume there would be some way to specify the password (in an
environment var or whatever), so batch command scripts would still be
possible.  For example, I keep a read-only reference tree sync'd by a cron job
that runs at 3am every morning...it'd be a pain to have to wake up to enter a
password for that :-)).

- --
Scott Blachowicz
sab at seanet.com