Shared working directories (was: Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: [MERGE REQUEST] changeset translation preparatory work)

[Cameron Patrick]

Colin Walters wrote:

| But I think the case of two users who are using different versions
| of tla but sharing a working directory would be quite uncommon, if
| it would ever really happen.

(Getting side-tracked a bit here:) Having tried to share an arch
working directory between a few users, I'd have to say that it's an
exercise in frustration, due to a few quirks (bugs?) of tla.

We are using arch to manage the web pages for our local LUG.  All
webmasters are members of the group "webslave" and have umasks set to
002, and we have no problems writing to a shared archive.  We tried to
go further, and have a shared checked-out copy of the web pages on the
web server that any of us could make small changes easily.  Unfortunately,
tla seems to ignore the setgid bit on directories when it builds a
pristine copy of the tree -- it doesn't track the setgid bit of source
files and it ignores the setgid bit of the directory it's in.  Files
would be group-writable, but have the wrong group.  For a while I
tried to kludge around this by having a makefile target to make
everything setgid, but this didn't work for ++pristine-trees (because
tla noticed things had changed behind its back) and tla would
regularly choke when committing because it couldn't alter a pristine
which was owned by another user.  So we had to give up on having a
shared working directory.

Cameron.