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This is a project based on a fairly recent idea, so there's essentially no code yet...
Nevertheless, the project aims to establish a Subversion based Document-Management-System (DMS). The motivation for Subversion as the working engine are numerous:
- tried and true versioning mechanism,
- plethora of access clients,
- abilitity to retrieve all documents and work offline.
Yet, there are a few aspects that Subversion doesn't provide (and does not aim to provide):
- fine grained access restrictions
- workflow for managing the document lifetime cycle
The ability to restrict access to certain documents is essential to every DMS and thus remains a major part of what a Subversion based DMS must implement itself. Subversion itself provides elementary access restriction mechanisms and through the use of the Apache webserver one can extend these capabilities even further. Still, these traditional approaches do not provide the dynamic nature of a document based access control mechanism, thus a more advanced working model is required.
Two Apache Modules might be usable in order to implement dynamic access restrictions: mod_authz_ldap and mod_authz_mysql. Both allow for dynamic queries which allow the inclusion of request targets in their queries. The mod_authz_ldap will include the new filter expression '%u' in the next release (we've already submitted the patch) which allows for LDAP entries to store the access privileges to elements in the DMS - the same approach is possible with the mod_authz_mysql module. The subversion repository will be configured such that newly created elements will be assigned access rights based on the system's and user's preferences.
A web interface will allow not only the administration of the DMS system, but also include access functionality if the user does not desire to use a seperate Subversion client for document retrieval.
Lastly, the system aims to facilitate the simple import of existing Subversion repositories and thus be of use to great number of user bases that already use Subversion for their document mangement but lack the aforementioned capabilities.
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Accessible Version
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