# Despot help

Despot is the system for administrating users at mozilla.org.

### Users

A username is someone with an e-mail address. As far as Despot is concerned, the e-mail address *is* the username. We don't give away new sets of ids, we just use the full e-mail address.

CVS account names are the full e-mail address, with the '@' replaced by a '%'.

For each user, we also record:

- The full name.
- An encrypted password.
- Whether this user is a "despot" -- one of the elite few who can view anything, change anything. A despot is an administrator, a superuser.
- What group the user is in on each of our CVS repositories. At the moment, the legal groups are:
  - None -- not allowed to use this repository at all.
  - webmonkey -- normal usage.
  - cvsadm -- can access the entire CVS repository, including all the administrative stuff in CVSROOT.
- Whether the users account is frozen until they change their password.
- A numeric ID (used internally only).

### Partitions

A partition in Despot is a section of a CVS tree. It defines a branch and a set of files within that branch. There should be a partition for every module listed in the module owners document. I could've used the word "module" here, but I hate it. (Not that "partition" is much better.)

Anyway, for each branch, every file may appear in at most one partition. Put another way, if a given file appears in more than partition, then it must be on a different branch in each of those partitions.

Each partition defines the following:

#### Branch

The branch for this partition. HEAD means the trunk; no branch.

#### Files

A list of files. If the last characters are "/*", then it means "anything in this directory, or in any subdirectory". If the last characters are "/%", then it means only files within this directory; subdirectories are not included.

#### Owners

This is a list of people who are considered to own this partition. They are all-powerful, within the limits of their partition.

#### Peers

This is a list of people that the owners have designated as primary support people for this partition. In theory, they have less powers than the Owners, but at present they are treated identically.

#### Members

This is a list of people that are allowed to check into the partition when the partition has been put into "restricted" mode.

#### State

A partition is in one of these states:

Open: | Anyone in the world may change any of the files in this partition.
Restricted: | Only Owners, Peers, and Members may change files in this partition.
Closed: | Only Owners and Peers may change files in this partition.

Last modified: Fri Aug 28 16:35:48 1998