Need ability to identify permissions and group by name

[jdetaeye]

User permissions are stored as integer numbers in the database and in fixtures files. The integers are auto-generated based on the defined models and user-defined permissions.

For instance, a json fixture to define a group looks like this:

[
[{"pk": 1, "model": "auth.group", "fields": {"name": "mygroup", "permissions": [22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31]}}
]

The problem with this setup is that the numbers change with any model change in the applications, and therefore invalidate all existing group fixtures.
This makes it inpractical to define or maintain predefined group definitions, and also makes it harder to re-use django applications across projects.

Ideally, the fixtures store the permissions as a string, which is translated into the internal numbering used by django during the load.
Having the ability to define groups in the models.py or admin.py would also be helpful.

(Ticket #6020 describes another situation where identifying a group by a string comes in handy)

[Russell Keith-Magee]

Making a special case of groups and permissions is not really a good idea. However, providing the ability to cross-reference entries in a fixture by name would be useful; in fact, it is required to work around some other issues in serialization. This idea has been proposed elsewhere; #7052 is the ticket tracking ideas and progress.