[Zope-Coders] If 'import Zope' is bad then...

[Evan Simpson]

Shane Hathaway wrote:
> Well, it's becoming apparent that unit tests for a lot of Zope products
> really need to use "import Zope".  The CMF tests need to be cleaned up,
> but you may find that not all dependencies on the Zope package and
> products can be removed without major surgery. :-(

I strongly believe that 'import Zope' or equivalent should be usable 
from unit tests.    The environmental changes it makes (for example, 
Products.__path__ surgery, Products initialization, and HOME setup) 
should be shared code.  Packages that are separable from Zope, such as 
ZPT, would be able to use 'sys.modules.has_key' to detect when they are 
imported in a Zope context.

We could refactor the various tasks in 'Zope/__init__.py' into another 
package or module named 'ZopeInit', and change 'Zope/__init__.py' to 
import 'ZopeInit' and call 'ZopeInit.full_start'.

Then test code would be able to import 'ZopeInit', call 
'ZopeInit.set_environment', fiddle with the database settings (e.g. set 
up a DemoStorage), call 'ZopeInit.init_database', and perform tests. 
Once done, it could call 'ZopeInit.reset_environment' to clean up after 
itself.

Separable code could switch AccessControl and other Zope-specific calls 
on or off depending on 'sys.modules.has_key("ZopeInit")'.

You can get some of the "same" effects now by cutting and pasting code 
from 'Zope/__init__.py', but that's fragile and guruish.

Cheers,

Evan