[Grok-dev] grok.Permission and grok.Role

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

I apologize if this feedback comes a bit late, though I guess it's not 
too late to potentially change anything.

In grok we use mostly use classes to define and register components. The 
class we create is the component and the fact that it inherits from a 
special base class gets it registered. If grok needs additional hints 
for the registration, we use directives a la grok.name().

All this is violated by grok.Permission and grok.Role. When I create a 
new permission, like so,

   class MyPermission(grok.Permission):
       grok.name('grok.MyPermission')
       grok.title('My permission!')
       grok.description('...')


the newly created class is actually not an IPermission. Furthermore, 
it's not an instance of *this* class that gets registered as an 
IPermission utility, it's an instance of a completely separate class. So 
the class I've created is a completely dead chicken. The same applies to 
roles.


Judging from the experience that I have with grok.GlobalUtility, but 
also with any other elementary grok component, I would at least expect 
to be able to exercise the IPermission interface (or IRole interface, 
respectively):

   permission = MyPermission()
   print permission.id
   print permission.title
   print permission.description

This brings us to how we can define permissions: we can simply fill out 
the IPermission interface on the class:

   class MyPermission(grok.Permission):
       id = 'grok.MyPermission'
       title = 'My permission!'
       description = '...'


You might argue that we now no longer use the grok.name() etc. 
directives. I don't consider this a disadvantage. After all, they're 
supposed to be *extra hints* for the grokker to do creation and 
registration. If the object already inherently contains this 
information, I think it's much more valuable to have it with the object 
in the manner that's meaningful and described by the object's API 
(IPermission and IRole in this case).


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