[Python-Dev] PEP: Migrating the Python CVS to Subversion

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Guido van Rossum wrote:
> I hope we're correctly estimating the effort required to manage the
> server and the users. Managing users is especially important -- if a
> user is compromised (as has happened in the past for python.org users)
> the whole repository is compromised. Now this could happen to SF users
> too, but I'm not sure that we know all the tricks in the book to
> prevent attacks; SF has been doing this for years and that's an aspect
> of SF that I trust (I think I've heard that they have even modified
> their SSH server to be stricter).

There are three issues that I see:
- management of access control. This is actually something that we
  do on SF as well; if the pydotorg admins get overloaded, I'm sure
  the current projects/python admins would be willing to help there.
- assignment of passwords. This I don't like about the current
  pydotorg setup - there should be a way to chose your own password;
  perhaps without involving an administrator.
  I could imagine a web form for password change, and administrator
  interaction in case of a lost password.
- compromised passwords. The only tricky question then is: was the
  repository altered? Fortunately, for Subversion, there should be
  an easy way to tell: in fsfs, files never change (only new files
  are added). So we could generate md5sums of all files in the
  repository, and download these to an offsite place. If the md5sum
  of an immutable file changes, we were compromised (there are,
  of course, a few files that do change regularly).
  Of course, we also need regular backups of the entire data
  so we can restore them if they got compromised.

Regards,
Martin