On 12/02/07, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
being, yes it is a wiki engine at its core, it is however used in many settings. There have been several requests for per-page access permissions. There have been implementations of this. They just did not make it into the MediaWiki SVN. This is a shame because as a consequence you have a fork. Forking is really unproductive. With some regularity
To implement a secure read permissions system, you would need to rewrite a considerable number of code points, because the system was "designed", if it was designed at all, with absolutely no concern over who has access to the data. Users can export it, transclude it, view histories, etc. So far, we haven't seen a single, clean implementation of this.
I'm not saying it's *never ever ever* going to happen - I used to, but it's inevitable that Wikimedia is going to drop the "freedom" attitude soon enough. What I *am* saying is that, as far as I know, there's still nothing on the roadmap for us to go back and start that process, and so far, it's been resisted.
If a corporate environment wishes to adapt software to its needs, and if it insists upon bastardising that software to act outside of its scope, then it is welcome do - you can do whatever the hell you like with MediaWiki, provided you stick to the terms of the licence agreement. What you can't do is force us to make changes that are fundamentally opposed to the overall direction of the progress.
Rob Church