Re: Does git have "Path-Based Authorization"?

On Sun, Oct 2, 2011 at 5:30 AM, Grant [off-list ref] wrote:

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Hello, I'm trying to decide between git and subversion.  Subversion
has "Path-Based Authorization" so I can give a developer access to
only specific files instead of everything.  Does git have something
similar?

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.serverconfig.pathbasedauthz.html

In distributed version control systems each developers gets full copy
(a clone) of a repository (separate repository instance).  This means that
if you want for developer to see only specified subset of repository
(specific subdirectories) you would have to split repository into
submodules, and control access on (sub)repository basis.

I do want to prevent reading of all but one or a few specified files
at a time.  I did some reading on the differences between centralized
and distributed version control systems, and I can see how a
distributed system may be better for open source projects, but a
business project like mine may work better with centralized control.
Would you guys agree in general?  Easier read/write control of
individual files in the repository is one benefit of the centralized
model I will put to use.

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However if you want only to prevent developer from making changes outside
specific subdirectory or specified files, you can do that on publish time
via update / pre-receive hook (like contrib/hooks/update-paranoid), or git
repository management tool such as Gitolite.  That would prevent a push if
any of commits being published touches files that it shouldn't.

P.S. Karl Fogel in "Producing Open Source Software" (http://producingoss.com)
writes that social solutions wrt. restricting contributors to given area
are better than technical solutions such as (overly-)strict access
control.

When I started this thread, I didn't realize the fact that my project
is not open-source would help decide which version control system to
use.  Now I see that it does factor into the decision so I apologize
for not mentioning it previously.

I'm afraid I did not follow the full thread, but I can assure you we
have several "secret secret" type projects at work, both mine as well
as many others.

There are a few occasions when they need the kind of stuff you seem to
want more regularly, (the only one I can really recall is one of our
largest customers has a custom version of one of our product for
themselves and do not want people working on the generic version to
see those changes in case they propagate to their competitors).  We
just do that by using a different repo entirely, and making sure
changes to common code migrate only one way.

Git has too many advantages over legacy VCSs like SVN for people to
throw it over for something as simple as this.