[Zope3-dev] comments on Guido's diary

[Jim Fulton]

Florent Guillaume wrote:
> In article <3DF49FE9.4060101@cat-box.net> you write:
> 
>> > Subproblem one: how to find this content object, given the
>> > Registration Utility object itself.  Several suggestions from SteveA:
>> > get the location (a tuple of strings) and look for '++etc++Services',
>> > or at least an item starting with '++etc++';
>>
>>After checking with Jim, I can confirm that looking for 
>>'++etc++Services' is the best thing to do here.
>>
> 
> How about using lowercase here BTW? Do we really need a cap?
> ++etc++services looks a bit better to me.

I like this.

and I suggest changing ++etc++AppliocationControl to
++etc++process, since this is really a about management of
the process and process-level facilities.

> 
> 
>> > A bit about locations: there are several different ways to represent a
>> > location, and in general functions/methods that take a location accept
>> > them all.  One form is a unicode string containing slashes for
>> > separators; a leading slash means an absolute path.  Another form is a
>> > sequence of unicode strings that don't contain slashes; a leading
>> > empty string means an absolute path.  The root is represented by ['']
>> > or ('',); an empty list or tuple is not a path (I guess it means an
>> > empty relative path :-).
>>
>>Look in Zope/App/Traversing/tests/testConvenienceFunctions.py
>>You'll find the class attributes _good_locations and _bad_locations that 
>>have the examples of valid and invalid locations used to test the 
>>functions that convert between formats for locations.
>>
>>According to this, a list is not a valid location.
>>
>>The empty tuple is not a valid location. Perhaps it should be. I'd 
>>welcome discussion and suggestions from people who have read through 
>>this unit-test.
>>
> 
> As Guido says, I'd suggest making () be valid and the equivalent of '.'
> in Unix paths. I think that's the natural semantics. It will certainly
> make code regular, and there's currently no way to express '.' in tuple
> form.

I don't like this for two reasons:

- It adds yet another way to do it, which is unpythonic. :)

- It should be possible to convert between the string and sequence forms
   with the simple expressions:

   stringpath = '/'.join(tuplepath)

   tuplepath = stringpath.split('/')

Jim



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