On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Matthias Jordan wrote:
A per-article ACL feature would be increadibly bloated
and I wouldn't
even know what benefits it could have.
We've already got one: every page has a "cur_restrictions" field, and
every user has a "user_rights" field.
Right now it's not extensively used and is partially hard-coded such that
only the "sysop" value is meaningful on pages, but it would be simple
to extend it to be similar to UNIX 'groups'... any user whose user_rights
field overlaps with the cur_restrictions field of a page would be able to
edit that page.
This wouldn't be relevant to Wikipedia, but we already load those fields
along with the page and user data and check them, just not very
thoroughly. There would be zero database cost to using them. Projects
which might want to restrict editing of certain pages to members of
specific groups could easily do so.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)