[Zope3-dev] RFC: Rename "principal" to "participant", my 2p ;-)

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Chris Withers wrote:
> Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:
> 
>>> - BUT, given that it's a big change and likely invalidates a lot of dead
>>> tree material, I'd suggest we just stick with principal and be done with
>>> it ;-)
>>
>>
>> If that last point were the doctrine by which previous refactorings had
>> to be undertaken (e.g. the refactoring of the Component Architecture),
>> we would still be stuck with services and other antiquated concepts.
> 
> 
> I'd hardly call them antiquated. I agree that early on in a project, the
> freedom to change and refactor freely is great, but at some point, when
> you want lots of people to adopt your project, you need to slow down and
> stop making wide ranging changes unless you really really need to.

This attitude has left us with Zope 2 where it is. I really hope that we
Zope 3 developers won't ever be too tired to tackle even serious
refactorings -- if they work out for the better, of course.

However, when I look at recent refactorings, and even just the fact that
deprecating things is easy and much less pain that it was before, thanks
to Stephan's zope.deprecation, I'm pretty confident and needn't worry.

> In this case, it's a largely cosmetic change that doesn't do anything
> except invalidate a whole load of documentation ;-)

You're right about this being largely cosmetic. But I disagree that this
means it's not worth to "invalidate" lots of docs. The reason I proposed
the name change was for the sake of docs. So, changing the docs was
actually one of my intentions :).

Anyway, I think the discussion has reached a point where I can safely
withdraw my proposal. Thanks to everyone for their valuable comments. I
must say I feel better about "principal" now. Not the word itself, but
the way we use it and the fact that it's used by others. Proper
translations remain to be found...

Philipp