[pmwiki-users] AuthUser group problem

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Aug 22, 2006 at 09:07:44PM -0800, akc wrote:
> I am having a problem with the way the AuthUser script builds the $auth
> array for authorization groups.  Several of the userids I need to be
> included in authorization groups contain one or more spaces, which is
> causing such userids to be considered as 2 or more separate usernames 
> when building the $auth array.  My groups as specified in Site.AuthUser 
> are similar to: 
>  @usrgroup: user1, BarFoo, foo bar, user4, bar foo barbar, user6

The notion of having spaces in usernames is a little bizarre.
I can't think of *any* other authentication systems in common use that
allow usernames to have spaces, which is why PmWiki doesn't
use them.

> I believe the regular expression patterns are the source of my problem, 
> but I do not know enough about expression pattern syntax to resolve 
> this.  
> 
> Any suggestions?

Since PmWiki is using spaces to separate items in lines, it's a bit
difficult to have usernames with spaces in them.  It can be done, but
we'd have to change the code to accept things like

    @usrgroup: user1, BarFoo, "foo bar", user4, "bar foo barbar", user6

so that we can tell when space is a separator and when it's part of a
name.

If you have an existing authentication system where the usernames have
spaces, I might be able to extend the group syntax to accommodate those.
However, I don't have any plans to introduce spaces into PmWiki's
usernames, because it just makes things too confusing in too many places.
(And, as I said, I'm not aware of any other authentication system
where spaces are allowed in usernames, so it's not common.)

Pm