[Zope3-dev] Question: Are principals (sometimes aka users) content or meta-content?

[Steve Alexander]

> On IRC, Steve suggested that principals and "users" ("members") might be
> different objects and that principals are adapted to users, where 
> principals
> are meta-content and users are content. Another way to look at this is
> that, perhaps, users/members are content and principals are associated with
> users. Users are content and (for some principals) you can get a user 
> from a
> principal.

I can imagine adding a Content-space user folder that provides for 
content-space management of users. Such a user folder is really a 
"proxy" (in some broad sense) to the authentication service.

The default would be to have a "hidden, service-space only" 
authentication service. If principals make sense as content for a 
particular application, then you expose them through a User Folder.

This could also provide some compatibility / familiarity to users of 
Zope 2 who want a simple acl_users folder ;-)   (3/4 joking.)

--
Steve Alexander