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Hacking SER or SIP-ROUTER with Git

SER Git Repository

The Git repository of SER is available through HTTP, SSH, and proprietary Git protocol. The HTTP and Git access methods only provide read-only access to the repository, that means you would be able to check out your own copy of the repository, but you will not be able to push your changes back.

To clone the repository using HTTP do:

git clone http://git.sip-router.org/ser

To clone the repository using Git protocol do:

git clone git://git.sip-router.org/ser

If you have write access to the repository and access to the git host then you can checkout the repository using ssh:

git clone ssh://username@git.sip-router.org/ser

where username is your username on host git.sip-router.org

You can also browse the repository through the gitweb WWW interface at http://git.sip-router.org

Repository Layout

CVS Compatibility

The repository is also available through cvs for those who do not want or cannot use git. A recent version of cvs client is needed to access the repository. You need to have the following two environment variable set if you want to access the repository anonymously through the pserver method:

export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sip-router.org/ser
export CVS_SERVER=git-cvsserver

To checkout the source tree you need to specify the name of the head (a.k.a branch) instead of the cvs module!. You can see what branches are available in the repository in gitweb at http://git.sip-router.org]] (look for heads)

The most important head names are:

master - This is the main development/unstable branch (HEAD in cvs terminology)
cvs-head - This is the branch that tracks commits in the cvs repository at berlios, no changes through git are made here
rel_2_0_0 - This the branch containing stable 2.0.0 release.

So if you want to checkout the latest development version then do:

cvs co master

CVS write access is only available through ssh:

export CVSROOT=:ext:username@cvs.sip-router.org/ser
export CVS_SERVER=git-cvsserver

cvs co master

Note that the layout of the repository is slightly different than it used to be on berlios, see section Repository Layout. The cvs compatibility layer does not support tagging and branching, so you would need to use git for that.

Mail Notifications

The central git repository can send email notifications whenever a contributor pushes commits into it. The mailing script is in $GIT_REPO/hooks/mail and it is called from $GIT_REPO/hooks/update. The notifications can be configured from the repository. To enable mail notifications you have to set mailNotifications to true in the hooks section:

[hooks]
    mailNotification = true

After that you need to configure the sender and recipient email addresses and a link to gitweb. These parameters belong to section mail:

[mail]
    envelopeSender = admin@sip-router.org
    recipient = admin@sip-router.org
    gitwebURL = http://git.sip-router.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi

Parameter \'\'envelopeSender\'\' configures the sender address to be put in the message envelope. This is the email address that will receive delivery status notification and notifications of failures. This is not the email address that will be put in From header, the From header will be set to your name and email address which you configured in git and which appears in the commits.

Parameter \'\'recipient\'\' is the destination address, usually a development mailing list. Mail notifications can contain a link to gitweb in the body, configure \'\'gitwebURL\'\' with the URL to your gitweb if you want to have a link to gitweb in your email notifications.

The mapping of usernames to email addresses is done using a static file. The original commitlog script used a static address in From. I then modified the script to extract the author information from the commit object so that we can use it in From and people can reply to commitlog messages directly – reaching the author of the change. Unfortunately this did not work as I expected. A contributor might pull some changes from a private repository for somebody else and then the email address of that person would be in the author field and in From header of the commitlog, although the commit was done by somebody else. Then we tried to use the committer field from the commit object, but the result was the same, most of the time it contains the same email address as the author field.

It turned out that we couldn\'t use GIT_COMMITTER_NAME and GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL environment variables in people\'s ~/.bashrc either to be used in From, because git executes the shell as non-interactive and non-login so the startup files are ignored when git executes commands and hooks on the server.

So I ended up adding a simple mapping file, it is in $GIT_DIR/email_map

format is \"username=First Last <email>\"

You can define a catch-all rule in the mapping file which will be used whenever no matching username can be find if you replace the username with *:

*=root@localhost

and I added a new configuration option to the git config where you can specify with mapping file will be used for the repository:

[mail]
    envelopeSender = email_addr
    recipient = email_addr
    gitwebURL = http://git.sip-router.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi
    emailMap = $GIT_DIR/email_map

The mailing script dies if it cannot translate a username to email address. It is also possible specify a static From address in the git confiuration file, i.e:

[mail]
    from=admin@sip-router.org

Then the static configuration takes precedence. Two more improvements to come are:

Update the cvs synchronization script so that we get notifications of commits from cvs.
Implement a new option which would allow us to explicitly set the list of branches that generate commit logs.

Branch ACLs

Write access to specific branches can be limited. This is implemented in the update hook. There are 2 files that control who can commit and on which branch:

$GIT_DIR/info/allowed-users : contains one branch pattern and a user pattern list on each line (the patterns are

regular expressions separated by white space). Empty lines and comments (lines starting with \'#\') are allowed. The branch rules evaluate in the order they are written in the file and they stop at the first match. If the username matches one of the user patterns on the first line matching the branch it will be allowed to commit, else if the branch matched it will be denied and if no branch pattern matched it depends on the acl.defaultPolicy config variable.

# Example:
# Format: branch_pattern user_pattern_list
# All the patterns are regular expressions, separated by whitespace
# A branch patter starting with a \'+\' has a special meaning: on that branch
# non-fast-forwards are allowed.
# The pattern evaluation stops on first match (so all user allowed to commit
# on some branch should be listed on the same line)

# original ser branches are read only (only root is allowed to update them)
refs/heads/cvs-head     root

# everybody can do any change in tmp/* branches
+refs/heads/tmp/.*      .*

# everybody can commit on the master branch
refs/heads/master$      .*

# everybody can make any tag
refs/tags/.*            .*

$GIT_DIR/info/allowed-groups : same as above but uses unix group names instead of usernames. It\'s evaluated only if no match

was found in $GIT_DIR/info/allowed-users.

Config options:

acl.defaultPolicy : if set to \"allow\" and no rules match the branchname in the allowed-user or allowed-group files, the commit will be allowed. If set to any other value, it will be denied.
acl.usernameBranches : is set to \"allow\" commits to branches of the form ${username}/.* are allowed, even if access to them

is not explicitely allowed in the allowed-user file.

Example config acl section:

[acl]
        defaultPolicy = deny
        usernameBranches = allow

Changelog

\'\'2008-08-21\'\': Hook post-update made executable in the ser shared repository to make sure that git-update-info is run–the repository is published over HTTP.
\'\'2008-08-19\'\': Fixed links to stylesheets and images in gitweb
\'\'2008-08-18\'\': Automatically generated doxygen documentation
\'\'2008-08-14\'\': Mapping of usernames to email addresses added, support for catch-all mapping rule, commit logs from cvs sync script
\'\'2008-08-13\'\': Commitlogs installed and configured
\'\'2008-08-12\'\': CVS emulation enabled
\'\'2008-08-11\'\': gitweb working, repo available through http, git, and ssh
\'\'2008-08-10\'\': Automatic synchronization with cvs on berlios
\'\'2008-08-09\'\': Migrated to new host

Remember

When setting up a repository that should be available through HTTP (i.e. dumb server), it is necessary to do \'\'chmod +x repository/hooks/post-update\'\'. This makes sure that every time you push into the repository, \'\'git-update-info\'\' will be run.