[pmwiki-users] Display error message when an include fails

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 04:57:42PM -0600, JB wrote:
> 
> Admins who do not want error messages could turn 
> this off. If they are smart enough to not need/use 
> an error message, then they are smart enough to 
> turn this off in the local/config.php file.

But admins (and authors) will also be surprised and confused
when (:include:) statements suddenly start revealing the existence 
of pages that are supposed to be "read protected" and therefore
hidden from view.  This isn't idle speculation, it's a fact 
demonstrated many times over on this mailing list.  It was 
such a common complaint that for 2.1 we've changed the 
default for $EnablePageListProtect to be "on" (previously 
it was "off").

It's not a question of admins being smart enough to change
the configuration (administrators could've easily set
$EnablePageListProtect=1 in config.php) -- it's a question
of "principle of least surprise" with the defaults.  

In this case, no matter what we choose at the default, we're
going to cause some significant portion of authors and admins
to have to spend a lot of time either trying to figure out
why things didn't work the way they expected or recovering from it.
So, in this instance, I'm going to err on the side of keeping
private data private (which has been a *very* common issue here)
and provide a configuration option to allow admins to report
when a read-protected page is inaccessible.

One other possibility is that we have (:include:) honor the
setting of $EnablePageListProtect, so that it keeps quiet
if someone attempts to include a read-only page.  But even
in this case, the default out-of-the-box configuration would 
end up being "display nothing".

Pm