Above and Beyond the Call of Duty, with Permission
Project Hosting on Google Code is a beehive of activity, with many large
and active projects and even more that aspire to that level. Now it will be a little easier
for project members to sort out who should be doing what by documenting each member's duties
in plain language on the new
People sub-tab. Here's an example from the
zscreen
project:
Duties describe what each member is expected to be doing. Project
owners can grant
permissions that control what each member is allowed to
do. While permissions can be fairly fine-grained, it's usually best to grant broad
permissions, and then trust your project members to do their duties or go above and beyond
them when the situation calls for it.
In open source software
development, anyone can access the source code of the project, and it's important to allow
anyone to access issues and project documentation. But in some projects, there is a need to
restrict some information to a subset of project members for a limited time. For example, you
might want to quickly patch a security hole before publicizing the details of how to exploit
it. Project members can now place restrictions on individual issues to control who can view,
update, or comment on them.
Here's some of what our new permission system allows
project owners to do when they need to:
- Acknowledge the role of a
contributing user without giving them any additional permissions
- Trust a
contributor to update issues or wiki pages without letting them modify source code
- Restrict access to specific issues to just committers, or to a specific
subset of members
- Restrict comments on specific issues or wiki pages
when another feedback channel should be used instead
- Automatically set
access restrictions based on issue labels
Getting started is easy, just
click the
People sub-tab and start to document what you and your project
team are supposed to be doing. If you need to mess with permissions, see our
permission system documentation for all the details.
If you'd like to meet some of the people behind Google Code, please drop by
the Google booth at
OSCON 2009 this week.
By Jason Robins, Project Hosting on Google Code Team
