use the ikiwiki userdb outside of the ikiwiki edition access control

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+[[!tag wishlist]]
+
+Ikiwiki is static, so access control for viewing the wiki must be implemented on the web server side. Managing wiki users and access together, we can currently
+
+* use [[httpauth|plugins/httpauth/]], but some [[passwordauth|plugins/passwordauth]] functionnality [[is missing|todo/httpauth_feature_parity_with_passwordauth/]];
+* use [[passwordauth|plugins/passwordauth]] plus [[an Apache `mod_perl` authentication mechanism|plugins/passwordauth/discussion/]], but this is Apache-centric and enabling `mod_perl` just for auth seems overkill.
+
+Moreover, when ikiwiki is just a part of a wider web project, we may want to use the same userdb for the other parts of this project.
+
+I think an ikiwiki plugin which would (re)generate an htpasswd version of the user/passwd base (better, two htpasswd files, one with only the wiki admins and one with everyone) each time an user is added or modified would solve this problem:
+
+* access control can be managed from the web server
+* user management is handled by the passwordauth plugin
+* htpasswd format is understood by various servers (Apache, lighttpd, nginx, ...) and languages commonly used for web development (perl, python, ruby)
+* htpasswd files can be mirrored on other machines when the web site is distributed
+
+-- [[nil]]