[Zope3-dev] Re: role (contextual) services?l

[Martijn Faassen]

Stephan Richter wrote:
> On Sunday 04 April 2004 05:06, Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:
> 
>>>Is this right, a user can only be in one group?
>>
>>Well, that is how *I* define groups, e.g. in a company I have
>>departments and an employee is most likely only to be in one department
>>(=group), although he might have different responsibilities (=roles)
>>within that department.
> 
> 
> Users can be in several groups. For example I am in the group "Physics 
> Department" and also in "Graduate Students" in my university.

Agreed.

The difference between roles and groups is subtle. Some claim they're 
technically the same thing. They're different though in use case.

A role is a hat I'm wearing (perhaps because I'm me, or perhaps because 
I'm in a group) when accessing the site. I'm an author, say, or editor, 
or CVS committer, or whatnot.

A group is some organizational unit I'm part of. If the site is away of 
this information, then this may cause me to get roles or permissions, 
but may not. Or the relationship may be complicated.

But I've seen fairly convincing arguments that a role is really a group 
and vice versa. This to me is more interesting from an implementation 
perspective than it is from a user interface perspective, however.

Regards,

Martijn