Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] authenticating EMBA (the Emacs build system, running Gitlab) against Savannah

[Bob Proulx]

Hello Ted,

Ted Zlatanov wrote:
> Ian Kelling suggested I contact you. Toon Claes and I would like to have
> a way for the Gitlab instance we have with the FSF (emba.gnu.org, the
> Emacs build system) to authenticate users with their Savannah usernames,
> to avoid duplication of effort and double registrations. Is that
> possible? Through LDAP for instance?

Seems reasonable to me.  The Savannah account database is held in a
MySQL database.  The user table contains the usual things that you
expect as well as ssh keys and gpg keys.  Passwords are used to access
the web UI while ssh keys are used to access git's ssh repositories.

Presently the FSF uses firewall rules to restrict access to listed
host IP addresses only.  I will add your GitLab emba.gnu.org to the
access list.  That would give that system the ability to query the
database.  You will probably need to do some exploration but I think
it should be fairly easy to plumb an auth system into using it.  I
have done that before with other Rails sites and could possibly help.

One technical problem that may get in the way is that Savannah is
running on Trisquel Belenos meaning MySQL 5.5.61 is in use there.  I
would imagine that your GitLab is by default using a newer version of
MariaDB.  What is your client and version there?  That may or may not
cause some minor communication issues between them, depending upon the
specific versions, due to changes in default option settings.  May
take some tinkering but should not be insurmountable.

I'll send you the mysql access information by a different method.

Bob