[Savannah-hackers] Re: webcvs

[Loic Dachary]

Summary: .symlinks files can specify cross directory symbolic links and
checks that no file outside the document root of www.gnu.org is referenced.

Jonas Oberg writes:
 > Loic Dachary <address@hidden> writes:
 > 
 > Well, what I suppose that you want to do is avoid symlinks being created
 > that points outside of the web root. I suppose what you ought to be doing
 > is to follow each link and see if you decide outside of /home/www/html/
 > and if so, refuse to create the link.

        I did what you suggested. Also I build a simple package around
the command and a manual page. I updated
http://www.gnu.org/server/standards/README.html#SEC01 to be more informative
and explicit. 

        After running the new version of the symlinks script it appears
that some people were already expecting such a behaviour (cross directory
symlinks):

( cd ./fsfe/siae ; ln -s ../images images ; ln -s ../blue.css blue.css )
( cd ./fsfe/law ; ln -s ../images images ; ln -s ../blue.css blue.css )
( cd ./copyleft ; ln -s ../licenses/fdl.sgml fdl.sgml )
( cd ./software/classpathx ; ln -s jaxp/jaxp.html jaxp.html )

        You will now find the package containing the symlink script in
gnudist.gnu.org:/usr/local/src/symlinks-1.1.tar.gz. Here is the manual
page:

SYMLINKS(1)    User Contributed Perl Documentation    SYMLINKS(1)

NAME
       symlinks - build symbolic links from .symlinks specifica-
       tions

SYNOPSIS
           symlinks [--ext=<extension>] [--top=<dir>] [--fake] [--help] 
[--verbose]

DESCRIPTION
       The primary goal is to cope with the inability of CVS to
       deal with symbolic files. By adding special files (".sym-
       links") into the CVS tree that are interpreted as specfi-
       ciations to build symbolic links.  The "symlinks" script
       can be run immediately after a "cvs update" to fix the
       symbolic links according to the specifications included in
       the ".symlinks" files.

       The current directory is searched recursively for ".sym-
       links" files.  Symbolic links that exist in directory
       where there is no .symlinks files will be ignored. Only
       directories containing a .symlinks file are handled.

       Each symbolic link specification from the ".symlinks" file
       is honored, i.e. the symbolic link is created if it does
       not exist yet. If a symbolic link is found in the direc-
       tory and is not listed in the ".symlinks" file, it is
       removed.

       Special handling to comply to the GNU webmaster standard
       is also applied.  If a subdirectory "foo/bar" has no
       "foo/bar/index.html" file and a file "foo/bar/bar.html"
       exists, then a symbolic link from "index.html" to
       "bar.html" is created even if it is not listed in the
       .symlinks file.  In short, an implicit

               cd foo/bar ; ln -s bar.html index.html

       is done.

       By default symbolic links that point outside the current
       working directory are silently ignored. This can be
       altered using the "--top" option.

FILE FORMAT
       The ".symlinks" files obey to the following format.

       Each line starting with a sharp sign ("#") is treated as a
       comment and ignored.

       Lines that do not contain two strings separated by white
       space are silently ignored.

       Here is an example of .symlinks file content:

               #
               # Link foo.html to bar.html.
               # Stricly equivalent to ln -s foo.html bar.html
               #
               foo.html bar.html

       On each line the first file name must be a relative path
       name to an existing file. The file designated by this path
       must not be outside the directory specified by the "--top"
       option or the working directory from which the command was
       run if no "--top" option was specified. The second file
       name may not contain any slash, it is the name of the sym-
       bolic link to be created.

OPTIONS
       --top dir
           No symbolic link are allowed outside the absolute path
           specified by "dir".

       --fake
           print actions and do nothing

       --help
           print a short usage message.

       --verbose
           print debugging messages on the stderr file descrip-
           tor.

AUTHOR
       Loic Dachary (address@hidden)

SEE ALSO
       ln(1).

2001-08-14                 perl v5.6.1                SYMLINKS(1)

-- 
Loic   Dachary         http://www.dachary.org/  address@hidden
24 av Secretan         http://www.senga.org/      address@hidden
75019    Paris         Tel: 33 1 42 45 09 16        address@hidden
        GPG Public Key: http://www.dachary.org/loic/gpg.txt