John Leasia reports an issue with the 2.6.0 conversion scripts with respect to the new permission site.add.course. Currently, the conversion script adds site.add.course to the user account template realms with a .auth role (good) but also "backfills" and adds the permission to other templates since the backfill SQL filters on all realms with a .auth role. The account template realms are all that should be updated in John's view since these "templates are used for *all* accounts associated with the template (all registered accounts, all sample accounts, etc.). Each user doesn't have their own realm that determines whether they can add a site or add a course site - they all get their permission from the same template. So, there isn't a need to set the permission in anything other than the template - no backfilling necessary." Backfilling for site.add.course is promiscuous at present, adding site.add.course to all template realms with a .auth role -- a conversion that may not square with an institution's permission strategy, as is the case with Michigan.

Matt Jones notes: "As we discussed internally yesterday, the backfill portion doesn't *seem* to be harmful to a production instance but, it just inserts functions into realms that are unnecessary. Backfills are only needed for changes to site realms, not user level changes. It may cause issues at certain institutions if have specific customizations to !user.template.

So if you've already run the backfill, you'll have the site.add.course function in realms like
 /announcement/channel/!site/motd
 /site/!urlError

where it will do nothing since those realms can't create sites anyway. The only one that seemed questionable was !user.template.guest, but by default that realm doesn't have site.add which is required to view the tab to create new sites, so it didn't matter either. So I agree this backfill should be removed while leaving the specific upgrades in place for !user.template.maintain, !user.template.registered, !user.template.sample. And information put in about this last minute change."

So do the following:

1. remove or comment out the sakai.add.course "backfill" portion of the trunk 2.6.0 and 2.7.0 conversion scripts
2. merge to 2.6 changes 2.6.x maintenance branch
3. Add a warning note in the 2.6.0 release documentation regarding this issue and point to the updated conversion scripts in 2.6.x