On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 09:04:53PM +0200, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:

This is really about whether the SCM solution should enforce any kind of policy. Obviously perforce already does this with its permission mechanism. You say that perforce shouldn't be checking the contents of the file, I could say that perforce shouldn't be bothering to control who can read and write the data: that is better handled at other levels by network and sys admins. Obviously, however, we find it *convenient* for perforce to enforce policy like "Joe can 'review' but not 'delete'."

Once you have opened the door to having the SCM solution enforce policy then you don't have any bright line saying what policies it can and can't enforce...it is up to the individual user to determine what is useful and convenient for them. Some users might prefer a solution like Aegis where it has fairly strong policy enforcement. Other people might prefer RCS which has very little.

One of the nice things about server side hooks is that you can do whatever policy you want. Or don't want. If you want speed then don't do any server side hooks and perforce will run just as fast as it does today.

Just because the complexity of enforcing policy isn't in the SCM solution doesn't mean there isn't complexity. It just means it is in the build solution (and probably more easily subverted in that case) or somewhere else. Some people prefer (or are required by contract to have) stronger guarantees about what goes into their source trees.

Justus