Hmm... ok, now I see what you are talking about, however, you are talking about modifying a DTMLFile object - I am not sure of any reliable API (Or even magic) that will allow that to happen in a "play nice with others" way. Just for clarity's sake (For me if no-one else), what object type are you wanting to change manage_main for? I have to admit to not knowing zshell or external_editor well, but I have seen mentions of ee making changes to the ZMI - I had assumed this was the addition of tabs (And DTMLFiles), not the replacement of them. I take it I was wrong in this assumption? Adrian... -- Adrian Hungate EMail: adrian@haqa.co.uk Web: http://www.haqa.co.uk ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Penny" <jpenny@universal-fasteners.com> To: "Adrian Hungate" <adrian@haqa.co.uk>; <zope-dev@zope.org> Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2002 3:34 PM Subject: Re: [Zope-dev] A Modest Proposal Concerning Monkey Patches
On Wed, Aug 14, 2002 at 08:46:41AM +0100, Adrian Hungate wrote:
Again, monkey patching doesn't modify source code, so I don't know what would be getting written into tmp.
Comments?
Didn't someone else make a proposal (with code) to handle this? Was it PatchKit?
Yup, and it is more than a proposal, it is a full blown product ( http://www.zope.org/Members/haqa/PatchKit ) with some patches already in it (They can be removed if you wish).
Nope... we have been down this path before. Note this what I need (see below on why) requires modification, and not simple replacement, of whatever code is currently running. As far as I can see, Patchkit does nothing to make this possible.
The problem is that A) monkey patches may or may not have been applied before a given product sees anything, and B) there is no reasonable way to discover what (or even if) patches have been applied by other products.
If you are going to go down the monkeypatch path, then there needs to be some way for other monkeypatchers to discover what you have done, so that they can decide if they can 1) extend your code to be compatible with theirs, 2) refuse to install their code, or 3) blow your pre-existing code away.
Current monkeypatch code always does 3. Patchkit has, as far as I can tell no way to make 1 or 2 easier. It just makes it easier to blow other people's work away!
Background: I am debian maintainer for zope-zshell. The debian release is currently a version behind. I have been holding off updating it because I would like the ZMI box. I cannot modify manage_main.py directly, because it belongs to the zope package and the changes would be blown away on any upgrade of zope. I was starting to turn it into a python product, but zope-externaleditor has been packaged, and it monkeypatches manage_main. The naive thing to do would be to install it as a monkeypatch. But then, either I blow away externaleditor, or externaleditor blows away zshell, depending on the order in which zope installs products on startup. There are several other products that monkeypatch manage_main as well, building a nice mutual destruction club.
Jim Penny
PS: I would also like to hear general responses to Jerome's proposal. Clearly this was not an API, no arguments have been specified. But is there a general consensus that this is a reasonable thing to do? Please, if it isn't to late, could we make it a 2.6 thing?
There is a fledgling API, though I probably need to document it better,
make
some unit tests etc, but it is there, and it works (For me... YMMV).
But yes, some "standard" would be helpful, possibly with supporting utilities, to allow multiple monkeypatches coexist, I think.
On the other hand, in Zope3 you just change the zcml files...although I think there was a discusion of an analogous issue there (coexistence of multiple "modifications" to the same area) and I'm not sure a conclusion was reached (but I can't remember for sure).
Adrian...
-- Adrian Hungate EMail: adrian@haqa.co.uk Web: http://www.haqa.co.uk