On 5/27/15, j. van den hoff <[email protected]> wrote: > he wants to ensure that > students can never mess up trunk, i.e. must technically not be able to > merge anything into trunk.
When the students have a copy of the repo on their local machine, they can override any permissions that anybody sets up and do absolutely anything they want with their local repository. It would, in theory, be possible to deny a "push" to the student who messed up trunk. But Fossil has decided not to go that route, as it adds an inordinate amount of complication both to Fossil itself, and to the user experience and workflow. For example, after the push is denied, what does the student do with their repository then? They have to figure out how to "undo" the trunk damage they inflicted? Reclone and start over? How do they fix the problem? It gets to be a big mess rather quickly. Fossil's approach to this is to implement mechanism, not policy. People with "push" permissions can do pretty much anything they want with the repository. But they cannot hide what they have done. They cannot "cover their tracks". Fossil provides capabilities that make it trival for the instructor to see that a student has pushed to trunk, and to easily back out any changes to trunk. So if the instructor will merely glance at the timeline from time to time, he can clearly see that a policy violation has occurred, and a few simple commands will fix the damage done - either by "fossil merge --backout BADCOMMIT" or if the rogue commit is the last one on the trunk, he can move it to another branch. Then he can deal with the student adminstratively (ex: lower his project score). The other approach would be to deny "push" privileges to the students and force them to email in "bundles" that contain their changes, to be added back to the trunk administratively by the instructor. That's a lot more work on the instructor's part, but it does guarantee that nothing he does not want gets into the trunk. -- D. Richard Hipp [email protected] _______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
