[Zope3-dev] RFC: Rename "principal" to "participant"

[Martijn Faassen]

Steve Alexander wrote:
>>I think so too. But I whould not try to explain a PAU (pluggable
>>authentication utility) without to use the word principal. I think
>>using the words user or participant for a principal in this case is
>>not a good idea. 
> 
> 
> Perhaps the scope of the PUA can be extended to have a plug-in factory
> for User objects, and to make the current User easily available inside
> page templates and other presentation code.
> 
> People who wish to use[1] the PUA would define their own User class,
> which could be as simple as taking the principal id, but would often be
> more complex according to the needs of their application.

Some abstractions to deal with user objects (which for instance can have 
an email address to name a common case) in Zope 3 would indeed be 
useful. I found I had to build my own already.

Note that such user objects (or group objects) in applications are 
frequently content objects and are accessible through content space. I 
think in Zope 2 terms this entity may be called 'member'...

The wrong way to go about this is to store user information somewhere 
under ++etc++, as that isn't content space in my book and I don't want 
to expose end users (that need to do user management sometimes) to 
anything in ++etc++. (it's okay to store low-level user information in 
++etc++, as at is now, but no extensible user info with extra 
information like email addresses, etc, I think).

Regards,

Martijn