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Re: SVN 1.10 AuthZ file parsing too strict?!

From: Branko Čibej <brane_at_apache.org>
Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2019 22:24:55 +0100

On 18.01.2019 23:07, Doug Robinson wrote:
> Honored committers (and the rest of us):
>
> It's come to my attention that if a group is defined in an AuthZ
> file without an associated account that SVN is, as of 1.10, generating
> an error and failing to allow the use of that AuthZ file.
>
> Example:
>
>     [groups]
>     goodGroup = acct1
>     goodGroup2 = acct1, acct2
>     badGroup =
>
>     [repoName:/someplace]
>     @badGroup = rw
>
>     svnauthz: E220003: Error while parsing authz file: ...
>     svnauthz: E220003: Access entry refers to undefined group ...

Thinking about this some more: If we add a warning callback to the
parser (I have that implemented locally), we may as well relax the
requirement for a group being /defined/, not just non-empty. For
example, this authz file will also fail to parse with the same error as
shown above:

    [/]
    @nosuchgroup = rw

and this one will also complain about an undefined group, but with a
different message:

    [groups]
    somegroup = @nosuchgroup

In both cases, instead of exiting with an error, just ignoring the ACE
or group membership wouldn't affect the semantics of the authz file. If
we can print warnings about such issues in 'svnauthz', users would still
have a way to find such bugs in their authz files.

Relaxing the restrictions on undefined groups (and maybe aliases, too?)
would be a change for the next minor release.

Thoughts?

-- Brane
Received on 2019-01-19 22:25:05 CET

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