ProcessWire's roles don't quite fit in with UserGroups in place.
Basic page related permissions are handled automatically based on per-page access definitions and probably shouldn't be included in any of the actual roles anymore.
But there are other page related ones (page-template, page-lock, page-publish), other internals (user-admin, profile-edit) and those of different modules' (form-builder-*, adminbar, ...).
On the other hand it's never been too handy to give roles for each user separately when there are lots of users. UserGroups add the group level which could be used to get over this inconvenience.
Maybe hiding roles from user edit and managing group-role relations could get us somewhere? And it should be made clear that adding page permissions to a role makes no difference regarding page access (though they could be used by custom modules still).
@niklaka wrote this on Trello:
ProcessWire's roles don't quite fit in with UserGroups in place.
Basic page related permissions are handled automatically based on per-page access definitions and probably shouldn't be included in any of the actual roles anymore.
But there are other page related ones (page-template, page-lock, page-publish), other internals (user-admin, profile-edit) and those of different modules' (form-builder-*, adminbar, ...).
On the other hand it's never been too handy to give roles for each user separately when there are lots of users. UserGroups add the group level which could be used to get over this inconvenience.
Maybe hiding roles from user edit and managing group-role relations could get us somewhere? And it should be made clear that adding page permissions to a role makes no difference regarding page access (though they could be used by custom modules still).
This needs more thinking...