On 7/11/07, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
Ultimately, it's this sort of subtle thing, that isn't obvious right off the bat, that means it's probably a very silly idea to try and modify MediaWiki to support this kind of complex read permissions. You'd be far better off rewriting the whole application from scratch, and there's no need to do that in light of other packages available.
I still think that this really overstates the complexity of making this change (allowing pages to even be hidden from lists of titles). I'm not volunteering to do it myself, but if we had someone willing to do it, you'd just have to have an extra couple of config options and conditional modifications to all the read queries in the software. A pain to do, undoubtedly, but hardly anything like a rewrite of the software, and not something that will affect anyone who doesn't enable the option.
Given that a) this is heavily requested and b) it's been established that this cannot be done in extensions since userCan is infeasible, it seems perfectly reasonable to allow this to be put in core if Duesentrieb or anyone wants to take full responsibility and be careful not to break anything when the options are off. As I've pointed out several times over the past day or two, we have basically the same setup for PostgreSQL, and that works out fine. But it's Brion's decision.