What is Sinis?

Sinis [seye'nis] , "plunderer," also called Pityocamptes, "pine-bender."
He was a robber who bent the tops of two pine trees down to the ground and tied each end of his victims to one of the trees; when he released the trees, his captives would be ripped in half. Theseus killed Sinis in this same manner

(Apollodorus 3.16.2; Diodorus Siculus 4.59.3; Plutarch, Theseus 8.2; Pausanias 2.1.4; Ovid, Metamorphoses 7.440-442; Hyginus, Fabulae 38).

Then one day Theseus came walking by:

Theseus walked a ways longer until he saw a man that looked remarkably like Sciron. The man said, "Could you do me a favor young man? Hold this pine tree down for me." The man's name was Sinis the pine-bender. Sinis bent a pine tree down and waited for Theseus to hold the tree down with him. Then Sinis let go! He was expecting Theseus to be catapulted in the air, but Theseus held it down. Sinis stooped down to get a better look at the tree, thinking that it had broken. Theseus let go of the tree. It hit Sinis in the chin knocking him unconscious. Theseus then tied Sinis' legs to one bent pine tree, his arms to another. Then Theseus let go, the trees ripped Sinis in half. Vultures screamed with delight.

However, today Sinis is an opensource software product that:

Allows you to have a permission concept on a default CVS (Concurrent Versioning System) Server.

Until Today we had no real posibility to restrict access to a cvs repository. People have allways been able to commit new revisions of files, apply delete and move tags allong revisions and even create branches. That off course is not realy what you want if you try to enforce a developement process among a team or even use cvs as the main scm (source control management) tool that goes from developement to rollout/test into production and vice versa.

furthure more you have the problem that there is no clever logging mechanism except the history file for tags and the loginfo file in CVSROOT. With does two tools you can get most information about what has happened in your repository except once again there are limitations such as there are no branch informations attached to commits or tagging actions.

Sinis does all that for You. It permitts or denies acces for commit or tagging actions and logs all successful transactions in a logfile.

We also plan to have a gui that will manage all permission settings for all users in a CVS Repository. That will grately enhance the usability of the permissioning tool that is currenty controlled by a complex xml document.