[Evergreen-dev] Discussion: deleting a staff user

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

It just occurred to me that the current process for deleting a staff user
in Evergreen is arguably overkill. As I wrote in bug 2052660 [1]:

"Currently, when deleting a staff user, anything associated with it will
get moved to a target user.

However, it occurs to me that nearly all of the time that this is overkill.
I think a distinction needs to be drawn between transferring ownership from
the staff user to be deleted versus rewriting history.

Concretely, the various user purge and merge functions will do things like
update the checkin_staff field in action.circulation. This has a couple
consequences:

- It obscures the history of which staff user actually did something
- If the staff user was active Evergreen for a long time, there could be
thousands of rows to be updated. One consequence of that is that deleting a
staff user can time out.

I propose that we consider rethinking how we delete staff users to instead:

- lock out the old account
- transfer things where _ownership_ by the staff user matters
- leave historical data alone"
I'd like to start a discussion on this topic. Other considerations that
occur to me include:

- the fact that deleting a staff account can lead to a timeout can
discourage users from doing that essential maintenance
- I figure that most of the time that when a staff user leaves, it's not
the case that you need to have the ILS pretend that they never existed.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/evergreen/+bug/2052660

-- 
Galen Charlton
Implementation and IT Manager
Equinox Open Library Initiative
gmc at equinoxOLI.org
https://www.equinoxOLI.org
phone: 877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
direct: 770-709-5581
<http://evergreen-ils.org>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.evergreen-ils.org/pipermail/evergreen-dev/attachments/20240207/f3c84b8f/attachment.htm>