launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Julian Edwards <julian.edwards@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday 07 January 2010 03:27:34 Jonathan Lange wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > There have been a few things in the last day where people said (in
> > bugs or mail) "I don't have permission to do X in Launchpad and I
> > can't work out how to get it."
> >
> > In practice I guess they ask a Launchpad expert, so it's perhaps not
> > the most urgent problem.
> >
> > However I was wondering if we could do something systematic that would
> > fix this for many cases.  Launchpad has a systematic definition of
> > security permissions.  As a thought experiment, suppose when a person
> > doesn't have permission to use a particular control or page, we showed
> > the repr of the security interface that controls it, rather than just
> > hiding it.  Then if that said for instance
> > "EditTeamByTeamOwnerOrTeamAdminsOrAdmins" (omg what a mouthful) it
> > would at least give a clue, and that could eventually evolve to show
> > you who the team owner and admins and system admins are, and how you
> > might change this.  Perhaps this could visually just be a little lock
> > with the tooltip showing the explanation.  Perhaps some discretion is
> > needed to do this only on particularly relevant controls, not
> > everything.
> >
> > What do you think?
> 
> I think that this is a good idea, that our permissions system needs
> radical rethinking and that we shouldn't block the former on the
> latter.

A good and trivial thing to do for starters would be to not remove links you 
don't have permission to click, but to just make them unclickable/greyed out.