Hm. I don't think this could be classed as a "minor" change, however, since it has impact on ownership, for example. What's the path of the user folder which is above "/", for example? The whole thing is useless if these extra users can't be owners, and the ownership machinery right now wants an access path. I think perhaps we should go the fishbowl route on this, if only to make sure that Jim doesn't have a heart attack when he gets back. :)
Looks like I was wrong. This was in fact quite a minor patch. I've only tested this lightly so far, but if anyone else wants to try it out, here it is.
Hi all - I think that this is _definitely_ the kind of thing that should be done in the fishbowl on dev.zope.org. Why? Because while it may be a "minor patch" in terms of lines of code, just applying the patch causes a number of problems that have nothing to do with software per se. They are the same problems that I get beaten about on a daily basis for everything that has ever been added to Zope to date :^) They are the problems that dev.zope.org is being designed to solve: o There is no visibility of the reason for the change. What is the problem being solved? How exactly does this solve it? Is it the right solution? Why did we make the decisions we made? Of course some discussion of these has occurred on the dev list, but the only way I (or anyone else) can discover these is to piece things together by searching list archives. o There is no visibility of the impacts of the change. How does this affect ownership? Does this work with all existing user folder objects, or do they all need to change to support it? If they all need to change, shouldn't we make sure that the authors of other implementation generally buy into this? What other issues might there be? Again, we can only scour the list archives :( o This would become Yet Another Undocumented Feature. One of the big things that the dev area is going to do is to force us to assess the documentation impact of changes and ensure that the required documentation is produced and integrated with the appropriate offical or unofficial docs. I can see the expanded access file change potentially having an effect on at least two kinds of documentation (user/admin guides and developer materials regarding how to implement new kinds of user folders). The structure of projects in the dev area is such that a finished project tells a story. What was the problem? What was the solution? How was it done? What documentation or other resources were created as a result? All of those things are available in one place once a project is complete. Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com