Move along, nothing to read

A few days ago, nicoj posted about using Gitosis on Gentoo, and as the developer that put the package into the tree. However, I don't think he realized at the time, that the Gitosis I packaged up, does differ from the original upstream version.

Why is is different? It is different because I decided to use Gitosis to power the new Gentoo Overlays, and found some limitations with Gitosis, so ended up hacking the codebase heavily to make it do what I wanted. It seems my original Christmas email to the upstream author went AWOL, so I wrote him another in the meantime. I hope that he will be able to merge the changed sanely, and make life easier for evertbody.

So what's different? A lot. Here's a partial list of the big stuff that is actually visible to most folk

• Relative git+ssh:// URLs! The original Gitosis required that you use : between the hostname and the repository for a relative URL, and assumed that you were using an absolute URL otherwise. This made URLs look a bit ugly, and also broke some classical URL parsers that expected a port number after the colon, then a path after the slash. So now Gitosis supports git+ssh://HOST/REPO style URLs, where the REPO is looked up directly in the Gitosis config to see if it is a valid relative URL.
• gitosis-init, you can use the default STDIN input of your key, or you can use actual command-line arguments: gitosis-init --adminkey=FILE --adminname=STRING. The latter argument is for when then username portion of your SSH key does not contain anything useful to you, and you wish for gitosis to place it in a more suitably named file in the keydir/ set of SSH keys.
• Handle SSH keys intelligently, validate the algorithm, supporting both SSH1 and SSH2 keys, extract the username (the field is actually a comment per the RFC) safely if possible, and handle the options correctly. Amongst the options, the from field of the key is now preserved, so that if you had a key (without a passphrase for example) that was limited to login from a certain location only, it does not become less secure.
• Allow setting of the initial directory permissions, globally and per-repository. Gitosis used chmod 0750 on directories it created before, which caused problems if you were running git-daemon as nobody:nobody. For the Gentoo overlays, the default repos now use 0755. If you set this globally, you should ensure that your gitosis-admin repo gets dirmode=0750, so that it does not get shared out by gitweb or git-daemon.

There are also two pending TODO items that I have for the Gentoo Gitosis-powered Overlays

• Gitweb has broken owner strings when UTF8 is involved
• The permissions handling needs an overhaul, adding a repo presently requires adding two config sections, each with 3 lines long. I'd like to refactor and make the [repo ...] section get a single line extra for the common case, which would totally do away with the [group ...] section per repo. Groups would remain JUST for defining groups, and the [repo ...] sections would get the lists of members and groups directly.

On a total lark, something like Gitosis for managing SVN users would be great too.

2008/08/03: Comments have now been disabled due to the amount of spam comments on this post. Email me if you have something useful to say.