[Zope-CMF] Re: [dev] unresolved site manager related issues

[Martin Aspeli]

Alec Mitchell wrote:
> On 4/15/07, Martin Aspeli <optilude at gmx.net> wrote:
>> Dieter Maurer wrote:
>>> Alec Mitchell wrote at 2007-4-12 06:59 -0700:
>>>> ...
>>>> ... deprecation of "getToolByName" ...
>>>> which is that there's no practical reason other than
>>>> aesthetics to deprecate getToolByName at this point.
>>> A very good point: let's deprecate deprecations done just for
>>> aethetical reasons :-)
>> Aesthetics were not the original reason for moving down this route, so
>> it's a little unfair to cast it in that light. The main drivers, as I
>> recall, were to encourage API usage that would allow us to move tools
>> out of content space eventually, and to make code depending on CMF tools
>> more consistent with "newer" code which may depend on new utilities (at
>> least in the Plone world, there is a general consensus that we'd rather
>> not have any more content-space tools from now on).
> 
> What is it about getToolByName that implies that tools are in content
> space?  Consistency with "newer" code is an aesthetic concern as far
> as I understand it.

I suppose it depends on how you look at it. If we agree that the way to 
get tools out of content space is to make them utilities, and we want to 
be able to promise the normal semantics for global and local utilities. 
In that case, moving to getUtility as the API and interfaces as keys 
seems to be a long term goal. As for consistency, call it aesthetics, 
but I know it's becoming quite hard to explain to new developers that 
various things are semantically similar, but there is an old way that 
applies to cases X, Y and Z, and then a new way that applies to all 
other cases.

Anyway, the point here is the consistency/flexibility/ease of migration 
in the future benefit vs. the cost of time/complexity and indeed whether 
it's possible to achieve all the benefits with the current tool 
implementations.

This was all nice and pretty when no-one had thought that 
tools-as-utilities needed to be wrapped at all. If that'd been the case, 
we'd just be having a deprecation warning discussion. :)

Martin