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

[Martijn Faassen]

Lennart Regebro wrote:
> On 9/12/05, Tonico Strasser <contact_tonico at yahoo.de> wrote:
> 
>>Here the obligatory dumb question: why is it not called user?
> 
> 
> Because it can be things that are not users. 
> 
> That said, "User" may still be the best name.

Yeah, I'd prefer 'user' too. It's true that they're more than actual 
physical users, but the tradition is well established already that in 
computing systems a user can be something else than a physical person. I 
certainly don't want to expose a user of an end user application to 
terms like 'principal'.

That said, changing things around at this stage would be a massive 
amount of work, and 'user' definitely would increase the confusion in 
the already not that simple authentication source code.

I am not that happy with 'participant'; it might make some technical 
sense but if you put that in an English language article or UI that's 
even worse than 'principal'; nobody will know what you're talking about. 
In that sense, user is again best. I think the "Zope 3 should be normal 
where possible" principle applies here: Zope 3 is not so special that it 
needs to make up its own vocabulary to talk about users.

At least the word principal is established in vocabulary somewhat, 
googling for principal authentication gives me a result page which 
doesn't even include Zope 3 in the first page. "Participant 
authentication" also appears to mean something, but I'm not sure what.

Regards,

Martijn