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

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Marc Rijken wrote:
> Stephan Richter wrote:
> 
>> On Monday 12 September 2005 12:31, Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:
>>
>>> So, I would like to give "principal" a better name. How about
>>> "participant"? After all, a principal _participates_ in an interaction
>>> through a participation (e.g. an HTTP request). Participant should also
>>> be pretty easy to translate: it's a common word, especially outside IT
>>> vocubulary, which means chances are good to find appropriate native
>>> translations for it.
>>
>> This is not true. A group is also a principal, but a group does not
>> participate in an interaction.

Why not? At least zope.security.interfaces.IGroup extends IPrincipal so
it looks like it was supposed to...

> From an end user point of view, the use of "principal" can be confusing.
> But for developers, it is common to use "principal". For example both in
> .NET and Java, principal is being used as term for "user". See for example:
> 
> http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/clr/about_security.aspx
> 
> and
> 
> http://www.samspublishing.com/articles/article.asp?p=28496&rl=1

Thank you for those links. I should have done some more research. The
motivation for my proposal doesn't change, though: I still think that
"principal" is an unfit term. I have given several reasons that are
still true and Shane has amended that list with some more that I can
mostly identify with as well. So far (and that includes consulting
clients, for example) I haven't found nodding and broad understanding
when I talked about "principals". More than often, I got a "what's that?
a principal? never heard that."

Martijn suggests to just use "user". I can live with that. The reason
why I didn't propose that is because I thought people still valued the
abstraction of a principal as opposed to the physical person. I don't
need it and all those Unix users out there don't seem to need it either...

Philipp