[Zope-CMF] Re: Abusing GenericSetup during traditional installs

[yuppie]

Hi!


Florent Guillaume wrote:
> Martin Aspeli wrote:
>> yuppie-2 wrote:
>>> If you write a new XML body to adapted.body the settings of the
>>> workflow are changed. The body is not stored as a string, it is
>>> stored as object tree. (So yes, the workflow is 'initialized' with
>>> the settings defined in the XML file.) If you modify the object tree
>>> TTW reading adapted.body will return the XML representation of the
>>> modified settings. XML body and object tree are just two different
>>> ways to look at and modify the same settings.
>>>
>>
>> Right. I cringe slightly when writing to a property has side-effects
>> beyond
>> just storing a value (possibly with some checks or transformations, of
>> course). In this case, it seems it does a lot more (changing
>> portal_workflow
>> for this implementation), in which case I think a method like update()
>> would
>> be more clear. 
> 
> I also never liked this GS API and would never do something like that in
> my own code. Side effects should be more visible.

1.) Whether something is a side effect or not depends on the way you
look at it. The only things I consider side effects are that in
non-purging mode setting 'body' doesn't simply replace the old value and
that in CMF 1.6 actions.xml modifies many different tools.

I think supporting the non-purging mode is anyway a mistake (see
http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2006-July/024665.html) and CMF
2.0 has no longer the actions.xml issue.


2.) Obviously many people look at this in a different way than I do.
APIs are made for people and should be intuitive to use. Unfortunately
the best feedback comes if APIs are already released and hard to change.
If I had known how disruptive the current API is I would have chosen a
different one.


Cheers,

	Yuppie