I found bug 6220, the bug is the first paragraph only, the rest is me rambling on because I thought there were some default password for newly created koha users when no password was provided.

6224 explains the same bug better and without rambling.

3674 is an implementation of users with disabled login from biblibre.

And 6218 has a tiny patch to auto generate logins upon user creation if none provided.

These all leave me thinking:
        1. what's the purpose of creating users? and
        2. what would be desirable upon user creation?

And those two questions is what I want to discuss here so answer may clear my view on this.

There was some prior talking in the comments to bug 6220 with Katrin Fischer.

The answer to my first question is pretty simple to me: we create users to use the system! But this leads to some defaults we were not enforcing:

- they will require a login (implemented on my patch for 3674), we cannot allow users on database without a login

- they will require a password. I think, but on biblibre it seems they need users with no password at all and also disabled users, which was implemented by making borrowers.password = '!'. It's not clear to me if they need both or just the = '!' one.

This leads to the second question:

- do we need empty passwords? or can we cope with disabled ones (='!')

- if we allow disabled logins, then shouldn't we provide a way to disable/enable them (right now you can only get a disabled login upon user creation, and you cannot disable it again once you enabled it)

- should it be desirable to have auto-generated passwords? If so, we need to decide if they would be viewable by superlibrarian upon creation (to tell it to the user), or if we silently will send it by mail directly to the user. If the second option is choosen, then we need to get sure KohaAdminEmailAddress is a valid email on installation and also require upon user creation to provide an email (and what if the user doesn't have one?)

- KF also suggested these auto-generated passwords should be made 'one time only' and force user to provide a new one on first login, which means we would need to add a new column to database, something like borrowers.password_valid_until which should be a timestamp.

I might be rambling again, so I'll summarize:

- I think database should not have users which don't have a login defined. Then we should enforce it by default making systempreferences.BorrowerMandatoryField include OPAC login field, and also provide a mechanism to avoid empty logins just in case some superlibrarian modifies it.

- I would like to hear from you to know how to close all these bugs/enhancements propositions.

--
Fernando Canizo (a.k.a. conan) - http://conan.muriandre.com/
GCS d? s:+ a C++ P--- L++++ E--- W+++ w--- M-- PE-- !tv b+++ h---- y+++
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