Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Permission issue in the audio-video directory

[Thérèse Godefroy]

Hello Bob,

Thanks for looking into this.

Le 08/06/2016 10:06, Bob Proulx a écrit :
> Hello Therese,
> 
> Thérèse Godefroy wrote:
>> Zak recently added me to the audio-video project so I could update the
>> audio-video web pages. But it doesn't work. I can download files from
>> the audio-video directory (/srv/audio-video/) by either scp or sftp, but
>> am unable to upload the new versions. Zak can't do it either.
> 
> I am completely unfamiliar with the audio-video files.  Is that even
> under the Savannah umbrella?  I guess it is since they are on download.
> 
>> I explored this directory by interactive sftp, and found out that the
>> files I'm trying to update belong to either the staff or the svusers
>> group, instead of audio-video.
> 
> I find a series of directories that are not set-group-id.  Which means
> files will be created using the group of the acount creating them
> rather than the project directory.  But since I know nothing about how
> this side of things are organized I am hesitant to just go changing
> things blindly.
> 
> Do you know how those files are organized?  Can you educate me on it? :-)

The only thing I know is what I saw in that directory: everything mixed
up. Very frustrating for a cleaning lady.  :)

Zak might know more about this?


>> Would you be able to change permissions in audio-video/ so that all the
>> files are writable by the audio-video group?
> 
> I am hesitant to do so because for example luca is not in the
> audio-video group and therefore this would have an impact on luca's
> access.

Luca has another login, positrone, which is in the audio-video project.
Apparently he used it to checkout the audio-video repo (when he created
the /srv/audio-video/ directory, I assume):
:ext:address@hidden:/web/audio-video

In any case, the old files that were checked out by luca/positrone
belong to the audio-video group.

By the way, I asked both Luca and Bruno Féliz (oitofeliz) to upload my
files, but they have more important things to do. I was told that it
wasn't worth fixing this directory since audio-video was going to move
to an instance of MediaGoblin. But this isn't going to happen in the
near future, the way things are going. So in the meantime, we might as
well make the old directory usable by members of the audio-video project.


> Could you be more specific about what directories of files you wish to
> have chgrp'd to audio-video?  I would feel more comfortable doing so
> if I could tell that this wouldn't be a problem for others if it is
> done.

Right now, I am interested in video/ghm-*/index.html and
video/individual-projects/index.html. They were uploaded by luca and
their group is staff.


>> Another oddity is that the audio-video CVS repo doesn't contain current
>> versions of the web pages. I tried to update one of them, but the change
>> never appeared online. Is this repo still operational?
>> It would be nice to track the old versions with CVS, rather than keeping
>> them in /srv/audio-video/ under a different name, as is the case right now.
> 
> I have no idea.  Never looked at it before.  Are you talking about the
> CVS repository here:
> 
>   http://audio-video.gnu.org/
> 
> Or?
> 
>   http://www.gnu.org/software/audio-video/

I only know about the second one. It hasn't been used since 2014,
apparently (except for a test that I did a few days ago).


> It looks like the latter one isn't getting updated.  That uses the
> same update mechanism on www.gnu.org as the other projects.  Which is
> to say the Rube Goldberg trigger to cause the web server to update.
> We don't have access to that end.  Have to ask the FSF admins to look
> at it.  Lisa has worked on that recently and should be able to kick
> it.  Sometimes processes get stuck there.
> 
> The former at audio-video.gnu.org is newer.  But it confuses me since
> it is newer than the CVS source.  The CVS/Root shows:
>   :ext:address@hidden:/web/audio-video
> And so I don't understand how updates are triggered there.  But the
> file appears to be newer than the CVS.

I don't think there has been automatic updates to this directory at any
time. The CVS repo is very old, but apparently it was checked out on
August 20, 2014 to create the audio-video directory. There may have been
a couple of manual updates since, but none in 2015 and 2016.

As a test, I created 2 directories that were missing in the CVS:
video/ghm2011 and video/ghm2012, and added the updated version of
ghm2011/index.html (the other index file is empty). I wanted to know
whether the change would propagate. But of course it didn't.

> At the same time I am seeing non-CVS ad-hoc backups.
> 
> -rw-r--r--  1 oitofelix audio-video  10473 Nov  4  2015 index.html
> -rw-rw-r--  1 luca      audio-video   7368 Aug 20  2014 index.html.2015-11-04
> -rw-rw-r--  1 luca      audio-video   2876 Oct 27  2010 index.html.old
> -rw-rw-r--  1 luca      audio-video   7373 Aug 20  2014 index.html.sed-backup
> 
> That leads me to believe those files are not using CVS but are being
> edited in place.

oitofeliz, luca, dskfw and atticusrex (Zak) are members of svusers
and/or staff, so I assume they can log in by SSH and edit the files in
place. Faster than using CVS.


> The hands here are happy to do but I fear that things are not set up
> for obvious help to be applied.  Anyone have more information on this?

I still think it wouldn't harm to set the group of all directories to
audio-video.


> Bob
> 

All the best,
Therese