Define Permissions

For anybody who wants to work on this: this recent commit by Chris, Kyle, and Galen is a great example of how to do this: https://github.com/evergreen-library-system/Evergreen/commit/1be684833a4d6cb26e63c3f4aeb79c19e08b74cf

A general observation:

When I first started using Evergreen (and to this day!), this happened to me at least once a week. At some point, I started googling "(whatever) Evergreen ILS," and that's how I found definitions for most of these things: "CREATE_LASSO: Definition - CREATE_LASSO evergreen ils," which brought me here: http://docs.evergreen-ils.org/2.1/html/permissions_appendix.html.

it's come up for me when I look at "garnished" accounts and have tried to figure out what a permission is, why it might have been added, and if it's still needed.

For the layperson (me), some of those descriptions are a lot more helpful than others. I wonder if providing some extra language in the documentation would be helpful? I echo what Christopher says: a lot of the descriptions are identical to the name of the permission.

I do feel as if I'm part of the problem, not the solution, in this case :)

Revisiting the old Appendix A - Permissions List from 2.1 came up during 2020 Hack-A-Way documentation session. Same link provided by Meg -- https://docs.evergreen-ils.org/2.1/html/permissions_appendix.html

This is on a list of old stuff that never got asciidoc'd -- so now it's on the to-Antorize list. Definitely needs updating with new permissions and friendly definitions.

I'll instigate conversations in early 2021 to work on updates; if anyone has started this work, please share!

I'm currently working on a permissions overhaul for PINES - it is slow going as I'm testing each permission and providing an udpated description as I find out what it actually does, but happy to share anything I've done so far.

I updated as many of the descriptions as I could into a standard format and would love another set or sets of eyes on these. (I think/hope I removed all permissions only relevant to PINES). I formatted in asciidoc in this Google doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F2xZb9EbJjGhv-QZif0UPp7crDy-gypx5ld7k6qr-Uk/edit?usp=sharing.

Some permissions do still have their name as the description, as I have not been able to confirm what they do exactly. Permissions that were documented as being deprecated, I used 'no longer applicable' as the description.

This list was previously included in the documentation from 2.1 as an appendix, so I can plan to add it as an Appendix C to our current docs, but very open to other suggestions!

Submitted two pull requests through Git:

Permissions List (added as a page in the appendix): https://github.com/evergreen-library-system/Evergreen/pull/234

Updates to Describing your people (linked Permissions list page and updated the language regarding the appendix): https://github.com/evergreen-library-system/Evergreen/pull/233

Both PRs merged to main & backported through rel_3_10 - thank you, Susan!