[Zope-dev] A Modest Proposal Concerning Monkey Patches

R. David Murray bitz@bitdance.com
Tue, 13 Aug 2002 13:51:12 -0400 (EDT)


On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, Jim Penny wrote:
>     B)  If so, he makes whatever checks he can to determine if he can
>         update the file in $(INSTANCE_HOME)/tmp.

Updating a (disk based) file and monkey patching don't seem to
go together in my mind.  I'm really unclear what you are proposing
here.

>   2)  If the monkey patch is installed, then the installed file is
>      written in $(INSTANCE_HOME)/tmp.  I.e., the new manage_main.py
>      is written to $(INSTANCE_HOME)/tmp.

Again, monkey patching doesn't modify source code, so I don't know
what would be getting written into tmp.

> Comments?

Didn't someone else make a proposal (with code) to handle this?
Was it PatchKit?

But yes, some "standard" would be helpful, possibly with supporting
utilities, to allow multiple monkeypatches coexist, I think.

On the other hand, in Zope3 you just change the zcml files...although
I think there was a discusion of an analogous issue there (coexistence
of multiple "modifications" to the same area) and I'm not sure
a conclusion was reached (but I can't remember for sure).

--RDM