[Zope3-dev] zope.app.intid and uuids

[Derek Richardson]

All,

I am writing an RFC 4122 UUID utility based on zope.app.intid. I wrote most of
it yesterday and there is more code shared between the two than is different.
The main differences are:

* OOBTrees, instead of an IOBTree and an OIBTree
* Different events are fired when an object is registered and unregistered (they
could be merged, but this is easy backwards-compatibility)
* _generateId() is, of course, different

The rest is pretty much copied and pasted, even most of the tests.

My question is: should the common parts be abstracted out into a framework for
id utilities, of which intid and uuid will be two instantiations? I know this is
a small amount of code but:

* I hate copy and paste
* I hate the idea of bugs in two places (implicit coupling, from a bug fixer's
perspective)
* Larger codebases mean more to read to understand what is going on for newbies,
like me

Of course, the duplication rule is "If you do it three times, you're doing it
wrong" and I've only done it the second time. So, part of this question is
whether anyone can see a future need for any id utilities other than intid and
uuid. If so, I think this would definitely be a good move.

Obviously, this would be a change to zope core, which is the main reason I'm
leery. I will be sending in my contributor agreement today and I plan to license
the z3 parts of my project as ZPL. So, I'm really wondering whether this is
worth changing in the core.

Thanks,

Derek