147276 - Remove "system groups" in favor of "privileges"

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Bugzilla :: Bugzilla-General, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

The idea of system groups is unnecessary and harmful, we need to change to
having system privileges.  This is because:

- You can't say you want a specific group to has multiple system privileges, and
change the members of the group in one place.
- Having groups with special numbers is grotty in the new world of unlimited
groups.

What we need to do:

- Each system group becomes a system privilege, and has a param that asks what
the group is for that privilege.
- This will likely have to added benefit of reducing the number of groups an
admin has to deal with, because they no longer need a group per privilege.

Comment 1

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

Not sure I like this completely...

having a role-based system is a good thing, but it may be easier to accomplish
by treating a specific group as a role, and allowing groups to be members of
other groups.

For example, if you have a group called "customers" and a group called
"developers" and a group called "managers" and you want both "developers" and
"managers" to have "editbugs" you can just make the "developers" and "managers"
groups both be members of the "editbugs" group.

Is this what the hierarchical groups (bug 157756) acomplishes?

Comment 2

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

Supposedly.  What you are discussing has nothing to do with this bug, before or
after this it would be the same.

Comment 3

[Joel Peshkin]

Unloved bugs targetted for 2.18 but untouched since 9-15-2003 are being
retargeted to 2.20
If you plan to act on one immediately, go ahead and pull it back to 2.18.

Comment 4

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

I'm not going to have time for this during the 2.22 development cycle.

Comment 5

[Max Kanat-Alexander]

Okay, actually, I think our groups system (particularly with the new groups UI in bug 354627) now handles things just fine. The fact that privileges are themselves groups is a good idea, because it allows us to control them using group inheritance.