On 12/02/07, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)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