WARNING: this is a work in progress

The aim of this document is to produce a checklist of things you need to do to set up a shared darcs directory on a server that different users can push to.

Basic checklist

We assume here that you are doing all of these steps as superuser

1. create a group for the users in question and add them to it

      addgroup cool-people
      adduser bob cool-people
      adduser sue cool-people

2. ensure that all users in question have umask 002 (sorry!)

3. create a directory owned by that group

      mkdir /srv/repos/cool-project

4. create the darcs directory itself

       # could be darcs get too
       darcs init --repo /srv/repos/cool-project

5. make sure the directory is group writable and that subdirectories inherit the group id

       chgrp -R cool-people /srv/repos/cool-project
       chmod -R g+rwXs /srv/repos/cool-project

6. make sure that people writing to the repo in a way that allows others in the group to overwrite the files

       echo 'apply umask 002' > /srv/repos/cool-project/_darcs/prefs/defaults

Useful concepts in a nutshell

• umask: applying a more liberal umask (002 as opposed to 022) ensures that fewer permissions are stripped off by default
• setgid bit (chmod g+s): on a dir, ensures that new files inherit the group ID

Things that can go wrong

• darcs: _darcs/index: opening of ’_darcs/index’ failed: permission denied (Permission denied)

  • I think this is not specific to _darcs/index. It’s just that you inherited overly strict permissions on that file. chmod g+w it just this once. You basically need to work out why this file is getting recreated with g-w; most likely the user has not set umask 002

• files are sometimes owned by root, why not the user that pushes them?