[Zope-PAS] General question about PAS usage

[Janko Hauser]

Hello, I looked at and used some of the code of PlonePAS. This got me
thinking about how PAS will or should be used by different
projects. I want to raise general issues in this mail, and ask
specific questions in another mail.

(In the following I will use PlonePAS (PPAS) as an example
but do not want to dismiss this effort.)

It seems there is a general trend for the established Zope-CMS's to
migrate to PAS. At the current state of PAS this will be done by
subclassing or by monkeypatching. PPAS has added API's for the
usermanagement and also added further plugins. If I understand it
right it also has changed the id-mangling.

I also do not see a way to distribute plugins standalone, as there is
no API to add plugins after the instantiation of a pluginregistry.

My concern is, that this will lead to incompatible changes in the
different projects. From reading the archives the id-mangling is a
fundamental feature, which will reflect back to the code of the
plugins.

So my question is, how other users of PAS do want to deal with this
situation and what will be the general direction PAS-development will
take. Should it actually become the main userfolder implementation? If
yes, would it be worthwhile to integrate it into the Zope-core code?
At the moment PAS is more of an insider product, and will remain so,
as there is no real enduser documentation.

I understand, that this is also a problem of resources. But before we
can hit this problem, there should be a rather coherent view, how
further development of PAS should be done and what should be the goal
of it.

Interested in other views, also if it's like 'move along and cope with
it' :-).

__Janko Hauser