[Gnu-arch-users] multiple committers, again

[Robert Anderson]

According to the wiki, there are the following solutions for
having multiple people commit to a shared archive:

0) set a umask which doesn't strip g+w in startup files
1) use a shared account
2) use ACLs
3) patch ssh
4) wrap ssh-server

None of these solve the problem for me.  I don't believe my
situation is that unusual.  I don't sysadmin my own machines,
requests for changes to ssh or ssh-server would be laughed at, I
don't have ACLs, shared accounts are expressly forbidden, and I
am not going to change my startup file umask because one use case
wants umask X while every other use case wants umask Y.

Has any progress been made on this issue?  I remember talk of
"piles of solutions" but if the wiki enumerates them, well then
"pile" is a good adjective to describe them.

If there was some kind of context that was detectable in a
startup file that said "this is a tla ssh session" then I could
set umask accordingly and that would work fine, and it wouldn't
compromise every other use of that startup file.  But as far as I
can tell there is no way to detect that from within the startup
file, so it has to behave the same way it behaves for every other
possible use.  And if every other possible use dictates a
different umask, it seems a bit unreasonable to blame this issue
on "not knowing how to use umasks properly" or whatever the usual
deflection is.  "Knowing how" and having it be convenient and
automatic in a way that is appropriate to context are two very
different things.

What else can be done?

Thanks,
Bob