[SAC] Wiki, Membership app form & LDAP

[Martin Spott]

On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 05:02:32PM -0600, Seven (aka Arnulf) wrote:

> Could you please repeat your suggestion how to deal with the existing
> Wiki accounts, just so that Jorge understand it?

I think we're having two options, one which is limited just to a
technical solution, another takes the 'social' implications into
account  :-)
The goal is to map current Wiki users to the corresponding counterpart
in our LDAP directory.  Thus we need to know about the proper username
pairings - for solving two issues, of which one may be considered as
being a minor one.
1.) I think it would be nice to map the authorship of Wiki edits to the
corresponding LDAP user accounts - nice, but probably not mandatory, as
the authorship is just sort of an 'attribute' to the Wiki edits.
2.) We should take care of assigning the existing Wiki user pages to
their respective owners after we've introduced LDAP authentication to
the Wiki.  I consider this issue as being a serious one because it's
about real, precious content.  According to the tests I did on a
separate Wiki instance, some of the user pages will just end up without
any owner.  Some other user pages might get re-assigned to a different
author, because some people registered their first name on the Wiki
first, some other people registerd the same first name for the LDAP
directory.

Anyhow, we need to find a solution about what to do wrt. the user
pages. Possible solutions could be:

a) Ping every Wiki user, ask them to backup their own user pages until
a date to be determined and purge every user page before we're
migrating the Wiki over to LDAP authentication.  This leaves room for
every user to re-establish their user page if preferred.

b) Try to automate the mapping of user pages to the LDAP account names. 
Ask every Wiki user to enter their LDAP account name into a custom
field at the Wiki login page, thus creating a list of Wiki-LDAP
username pairings.  This would permit us (me) to replace every
occurrence of the respective account names in the current OSGeo
MediaWiki database.

c) Have an additional entry field not only at the current Wiki login
page but also at one of the OSGeo LDAP 'frontends', preferrably at the
LDAP user profile edit page:

  https://www2.osgeo.org/cgi-bin/auth/ldap_edit_user.py

....  where users are asked to enter the corresponding Wiki account
name alongside with their LDAP account name.  The purpose of asking the
users twice is to enable us (me) to do a consistency check, making sure
nobody assigns some obscure Wiku user page to serious LDAP user
accounts.

Note, we (I) do _not_ need to establish any additional LDAP attribute,
having a simple plain text list containing the respective account name
pairs is entirely sufficient: One for the Wiki, one for LDAP.  Adding
another entry field for the mentioned Python script should be rather
easy, but I don't know how to properly add content to the Wiki login
page.  I've tried adding some PHP code which looked reasonable to me,
but ended up in having really strange formatting.

Cheers,
	Martin.
-- 
 Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
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