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    0001-merc-process
    test-writing
+   merging-roles-and-groups
 
 
 Type
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+===============================
+MERC XX: Unify Roles and Groups
+===============================
+
+:MERC: XX
+:Author: Michael Price
+:Status: Draft
+:Type: Process
+:Created: 2018-02-27
+:Last-Modified: 2018-02-27
+
+.. contents:: Table of Contents
+   :depth: 3
+   :local:
+
+Abstract
+========
+
+This MERC proposes the merging of the Roles and Group models.
+
+Rationale
+=========
+
+Mayan EDMS uses Groups as units of users that are meant to mirror an
+organization's actual user hierarchy. Roles are used as permission units.
+
+Separation of concerns is a concept Mayan EDMS executes very successfully
+but when it comes to the Roles/Groups relationship that execution causes
+overheads without providing advantages in the day to day operations.
+
+In reality there is almost a 1 to 1 correlation between Roles and Groups.
+Other permissions systems already use Groups as permission units without
+disavantages. An example of this is LDAP and its commercial counterpart
+Active Directory.
+
+Motivation
+==========
+
+Merging the Role and Group model will reduce some complexity when initially
+setting up Mayan EDMS. The merge allows removing a Mayan EDMS model in
+favor of using a native Django model for the same task.
+
+Merging the Role and Group models will also provide a speed boost in every
+permission check and queryset filtering. These checks are nested in nature.
+Since the access checks are performed for every view and for every link
+in the view the performace gain should be substantial.
+
+Backwards Compatibility
+=======================
+
+To avoid loss of role configuration a data migration will be needed to
+convert existing roles to groups.
+
+
+Specification
+=============
+
+Changes needed:
+
+1- Data migration to convert existing roles to groups.
+2- Prepend or append an identifier to the migrated roles.
+3- Intermediate model to map permissions to a group. This will substitute
+   the Role model's permissions many to many field.
+4- Update the ``AccessControlList`` models roles field to point to the group
+   models.
+5- Update the role checks in the ``check_access`` and ``filter_by_access``
+   ``AccessControlList`` model manager methods.