[Zope-Coders] DISCUSS: User groups (was: Speaking of 2.6...)

[Brian Lloyd]

> > > Unified Groups merges functionality of the NuxUserGroups addition by
> > > Nuxeo( 
> http://www.zope.org/Members/nuxeo/Products/NuxUserGroups ) and the
> > > Local roles blacklist addition (
> > > http://www.zope.org/Members/regebro/LRBlacklist ) by Torped 
> and also adds
> > > the functionality in the Workgroups proof of concept addition (
> > > http://www.zope.org/Members/regebro/workgroups ).
> > 
> > I think it's vitally important to understand what is required of
> > user folders to support this.  Right now, in the NUG branch on XUF,
> > we have to track groups (and probably should abstract that out to
> > a group source at some point).  Will we have to track anything else
> > inside the user folder to implement this?
> 
> Just a note: current NuxUserGroups are quite simple, but a number of
> things could be added on top, for instance currently there are no Roles
> associated to a group in the user folder (because I didn't need that).
> But the APIs need to be flexible enough to accomodate that later.
> 
> I'll be able to start participating a bit more in all this on Monday,
> and begin checking in code in a branch.

Hi again all - 

I was talking with Jim about this today, and he brought up some good 
points regarding this.

The current Zope 3 work is already starting to tackle groups and 
'deny' as a first-class part of the security infrastructure, and he 
noted that it might be a good idea for people interested in getting 
groups & deny into Z2 to pitch in with those in Zope 3 first. At the 
end, we'll probably have learned some things that would be good to 
know before committing to an architecture in Zope 2. That last point 
is very important, as we want to avoid complicating the 2->3 migration 
path if we can possibly avoid it.

Another possibility is to take advantage of the pluggable security 
policy in Zope to experiment with first-class groups (rather than 
role mappings) as an add-on product. 

Brian Lloyd        brian@zope.com
V.P. Engineering   540.361.1716              
Zope Corporation   http://www.zope.com