>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Tribble <[email protected]> writes:

Peter> It's not even clear to me that assigning roles is the desired
Peter> approach.  

Fundamentally, I think the choices are

1. permissions completely determined by role
2. permissions completely determined on a per-user basis
3. permissions determined by role plus some sort of exception list

The website dev team is currently using approach 1.

Approach 2 strikes me as additional administrative overhead for
questionable gain.

Approach 3 would be nice to have, but I'm having a hard time seeing this
as a requirement for the initial deployment.  From what I understand of
the authentication and authorization architecture[1], it seems like this
could be added later if we discover that we really need it.

Peter> What matters is whether a user has the appropriate
Peter> privilege to do a certain operation - which boils down to "can
Peter> edit X" or "can commit code to Y". As a project or community
Peter> owner, I expect to assign those rights to individuals -
Peter> independently of some abstract role they might have.  (Sometimes
Peter> they'll match; sometimes they won't.)

First, for code repos, write access can already be granted on a per
repo/individual basis.

For web pages, I don't expect there to be much divergence between rights
and roles in practice.

There might indeed be that sort of divergence today, but let's look at
the two cases:

a. user's role grants permissions that you don't want the user to have

b. user's role doesn't grant permissions that you do want the user to
   have

For a., XWiki will provide history and easy rollback (neither of which
is provided with the current portal).  If a user abuses his permissions,
the damage can be easily undone.  For cases of persistent abuse, the
collective can revoke the user's permissions.

For b., I'm having trouble thinking of an example that makes sense to
me.  If you've got someone regularly editing a set of pages, that person
is acting as a Contributor.  For occasional edits, any Participant can
add a comment.

mike

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/XWikiAuthAppIntegration
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