[Zope-CMF] RFC: PAS and the (non?) future of members

[Rob Miller]

hi all,

i'm wondering if it's not time to rethink the entire idea of members as
they currently exist in CMF.  members were originally a necessary evil,
because the user folder implementation of users didn't allow for enough
flexibility to support CMF's needs.  now, however, PAS makes it possible
to encapsulate all of the necessary behaviour in the user objects
themselves, and it should be possible to eliminate the complexity of
wrapping the user object altogether.

over the last few days at the snow sprint here in austria i've been
working on a Plone-based product called Membrane.  Membrane implements PAS
plugins which allow portal content to be used as the authentication,
property, group, role, etc. providers for users.  it's quite nice, i
think, very flexible and powerful, and i think it contains ideas that
might do well in CMF itself.

even if the content-based plug-ins are not desireable, i think it's still
worth investigating the use of PAS and the idea of deprecating the
member/user duality altogether.  anyone else interested in this approach?

-r