Hi people! One of most large packages that really wants to be refactored but still wasn't touched is zope.app.security. It has much in it and it brings many dependencies, including zope.app.form and company. And even some zope.* packages, like zope.securitypolicy still depend on it. So, let's finally refactor it :) Here's a sketch of a refactoring plan I wrote after taking a quick look at the current package: - Move IAuthentication and other interfaces into new zope.authentication package. Also move there PrincipalSource and the "checkPrincipal" utility function. Also move there the PrincipalTerms class, however that will add dependency on zope.browser (which is really really tiny, as you may know). - Move global principal registry, its IPrincipal/IGroup implementations and its directives into new zope.principalregistry package. - Move LocalPermission into new zope.localpermission package. I personally didn't ever need local permissions. - Rewrite PermissionsVocabulary and PermissionIdsVocabulary not to depend on zope.app.component and move them into zope.security. It's generally useful there and won't introduce any new dependencies. - Move zcml definition of zope.Public permission. Maybe move security declaration for the `zope.security.permission.Permission` class as well. - Leave all browser views, globalmodules.zcml, _protections.zcml, other zope.* permission definitions in zope.app.security as well as backward-compatibility imports. - Just to note: the "settings" module was recently moved to zope.securitypolicy as there's the right place for it. Not sure about: - ILoginPassword and its basic implementations. The interface should probably go into zope.authentication while implementations - into zope.publisher. It will add a dependency on zope.authentication to zope.publisher, but the zope.authentication are expected to be really tiny and already installed for most applications, so I believe that it's okay. - PrincipalLogging - the adapter from zope.security.interfaces.IPrincipal to zope.publisher.interfaces.ILoggingInfo. I'd just move it into zope.publisher, because it's already tied to zope.security. - ILogoutSupported flag interface/adapter. Looks like it's only ever used for enabling/disabling the "logout" button in the UI. I'd deprecate it and leave in zope.app.security. - _protections.py module. It defines a NoProxy checker for zope.i18nmessageid.Message and adds __name__ and __parent__ attributes to _available_by_default. This module was executed in zope.app.security.__init__ and generally does useful things for most of applications. The problem is that neither zope.i18nmessage, nor zope.location already depend on zope.security. One solution is to move the protections in that packages, placing the code into "try/except ImportError" block to avoid hard dependency. -- WBR, Dan Korostelev