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

[Martijn Faassen]

Shane Hathaway wrote:
> Steve Alexander wrote:
> 
>> In Launchpad, request.principal is not used by the application
>> programmers.  It is used only by the authentication, authorization and
>> publication machinery.  The machinery looks up a Person (an application
>> domain object) for the current principal (the participant, if you will)
>> and makes this available to application code.  So, application code
>> deals with an application-level object, not some security system 
>> construct.
> 
> 
> It sounds like you're saying only the security machinery should know 
> about principals, and that everything else deals with users.  If so, it 
> should not be necessary for any Zope 3 developer to learn about 
> principals unless they are writing security machinery.  Is that right?

If not that, we can at least make the weaker case that no Zope 3 *UI* 
user (whether it's the ZMI or something built on top of it) ordinarily 
should have to know about 'principals'.

Regards,

Martijn