[General] sandboxes or branches for interns/SoC students

[Ted Leung]

So the question has arisen as to the mechanics of having interns and  
Summer of Code students work on the various code bases, and we wanted  
to bring the discussion onto the lists

The issue is that we want the student's work to be available in a  
public place (that is version control) without granting unearned  
commit privileges.  There are several options for trying to make this  
happen, none of them ideal (at least in my opinion).

The possible options are:

1. Give each person a private branch in the repository sections for  
each product

The problem with private branches is that we also grant commit  
privileges to all of our repositories.  Also, it establishes the  
precedent of giving non-committer private branches and keeping the  
history of those branches in the version control repository.

2. Give each person a sandbox in <http://svn.osafoundation.org/sandbox/>

The sandboxes have limited access control, which is implemented via a  
pre-commit hook.   Unfortunately, granting commit access to a sandbox  
also grant commit access to all the other projects, because the main  
project repositories do not have a pre-commit hook.

3. Have new folks use svk <svk.elixus.org/>, which provides a  
distributed version control system on top of subversion

The problem with using svk is the need to learn a new toolset and way  
of working.


My personal opinion is that implementing access control on the  
repositories via pre-commit hooks is something that we should do  
anyway and that would solve the problem in the short term.

Ted