Re: git, monorepos, and access control

From: Derrick Stolee <stolee@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 5, 2018, 20:43 UTC
Message-ID: <a5a3009e-346e-2b63-5b7c-3e9daf0c7de2@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <878t13zp8y.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>

On 12/5/2018 3:34 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> On Wed, Dec 05 2018, Coiner, John wrote:
>
>> I'm an engineer with AMD. I'm looking at whether we could switch our
>> internal version control to a monorepo, possibly one based on git and
>> VFSForGit.
>>
>> Has anyone looked at adding access control to git, at a per-directory
>> granularity? Is this a feature that the git community would possibly
>> welcome?
> All of what you've described is possible to implement in git, but as far
> as I know there's no existing implementation of it.
>
> Microsoft's GVFS probably comes closest, and they're actively
> upstreaming bits of that, but as far as I know that doesn't in any way
> try to solve this "users XYZ can't even list such-and-such a tree"
> problem.

(Avar has a lot of good ideas in his message, so I'm just going to add on a few here.)

This directory-level security is not a goal for VFS for Git, and I don't see itbecoming a priority as it breaks a number of design decisions we made in our object storage and communication models.

The best I can think about when considering Git as an approach would be to use submodules for your security-related content, and then have server- side security for access to those repos. Of course, submodules are not supported in VFS for Git, either.

The Gerrit service has _branch_ level security, which is related to the reachability questions that a directory security would need. However, the problem is quite different. Gerrit does have a lot of experience in dealing with submodules, though, so that's probably a good place to start.

Thanks, -Stolee