[Zope3-dev] Initial thoughts on the Zope3 security framework

Jim Fulton jim@zope.com
Mon, 17 Dec 2001 14:40:20 -0500


"Barry A. Warsaw" wrote:
> 
> [Barely catching up on all the traffic on this list... -BAW]
> 
> >>>>> "JF" == Jim Fulton <jim@zope.com> writes:
> 
>     JF> Any setting can be made in multiple places, however, role and
>     JF> permission *definition* tends to be done centrally, where
>     JF> "central" in this sense is a bit relative. In most cases, as
>     JF> site will have one set of role definitions and once set of
>     JF> permission definitions. Some sites might include "sub-sites",
>     JF> where sub-sites have their own "global" definitions, that
>     JF> build on the site global definitions.
> 
> This is actually a very interesting issue, and something that I
> suspect a lot of systems need/want to address.  E.g. in Mailman, we
> have several cascading levels of permissions where (ideally) we'd like
> to set up option defaults site-wide, and then be able to choose which
> options we will delegate to sub-groups (i.e. virtual domains).  The
> owners of those sub-groups can then choose to delegate some or all of
> their options to smaller groups (i.e. to list owners).
> 
> Acquisition /seems/ like a natural fit here, and it's the one place
> where I can see that feature actually making the problem easier to
> solve. 

There are lots of problems that Acquisition makes easier to solve, 
that's why so many systems use acquisition, usually without the authors
realizing that they are using a general pattern.

> I wonder whether there's something here we can generalize into
> a generic Python library?

I would offer up the Acquisition extension is it wasn't going to be rewritten
for Python 2.2. ;)

Jim

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