[Pmwiki-users] Easily Hackable?

[Fabio Reis Cecin]

On 3 Apr 2004 at 23:32, Pmwiki-users-request at pmichaud.com wrote:

> Date: Sun, 04 Apr 2004 00:17:13 -0600
> From: Eric Celeste <efc at umn.edu>
> Subject: [Pmwiki-users] Easily Hackable?
> To: <pmichaud at pobox.com>
> (...)
> I think authorization really has been done best when it includes both groups
> (of users) and hierarchy. My favorite model has been AFS, which applies
> rights to directories rather than files. In PmWiki's world, this would be
> similar to binding the rights to the groups (of pages) rather than to the
> files. In a way, this is a cousin of the "all-or-nothing" approach, but not
> quite so easy to solve. The need for page-level control fades if you allow
> groups to have a hierarchy (groups (of groups (of groups (of pages)))).

Maybe this is a deviation of the original discussion but I'll post anyway:

I was thinking for a long time that nested groups are needed in PmWiki to
solve a problem I'm curently having. But then the solution (NOT needing
nested groups) just struck me (while I was typing a reply stating that
nested groups would be a great addition :-) :

My current problem is this:

 CMP167 : our group name for this example, it's a course name

 CMP167.SistemaDeAvaliacao2003 : evaluation system for the classes' 2003 edition

 CMP167.SistemaDeAvaliacao2004 : evaluation system for the classes' 2004 edition

What's wrong here: the page names need additional information to keep them unique.
Reading "SistemaDeAvaliacao2004" lots of time in the pages kinda sucks; ideally, the
student while browsing the pages should choose the classes' year (2003 or 2004) and
never see dates again in the wiki text.

But, of course, the solution is to keep the GROUP NAMES complex. Imagine that the
group name is the "full path" of your pages. So, instead, I should have created groups
of pages named like this:

 CMP167a2003 : group of pages for classes' year 2003

 CMP167a2004 : group of pages for classes' year 2004

Now I'm free to have pages named just "SistemaDeAvaliacao" inside each group.

If, in a filesystem, you have "/dir_a/dir_b/file", in the wiki you should have 
"DirADirB.FiLe" :-)

So simple, but it took me a lot of time to realize this. D'oh!

What do you think? Maybe this tip is worth putting in the docs...

- Fabio