[Zope3-dev] Cleaning up the widget mess a little bit: bug or feature

[Gary Poster]

On Dec 20, 2006, at 7:15 AM, Christian Theune wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Gary Poster wrote:
>> On Dec 19, 2006, at 2:34 AM, Christian Theune wrote:
>>
>>> Hi again,
>>>
>>> Gary Poster wrote:
>>>> I don't have a very strong feeling about it, but lean towards "bug
>>>> fix".  It didn't break any of our code (or at least any of our
>>>> tests :-) ) so it seems safe from my perspective.
>>> I was trying to apply the patch to the 3.3 branch and noticed  
>>> that the
>>> patch isn't compatible, as it requires a restructuring that
>>> happened on
>>> the trunk a while ago. This refactoring (r70331) introduces a very
>>> small
>>> feature, but the broken behaviour (trying to put anything into
>>> _toFormValue) exists in the old variant as well.
>>
>> It's a bit murky, since 70331 only changes internal APIs, but
>> unfortunately the widget subclass API is effectively public in IMO.
>> I don't think 70331 is ok to push back, unfortunately.  A shame, but
>> then the easiest thing to do is treat 71548 as a feature too; the
>> other option would be to revise the fix in 71548 for pre-70331.
>
> I've had the same feeling initially. I'm looking at 70331 again and
> don't think it's too bad.
>
> Agreed, the potential for an incompatibility is there, because some
> client code might have used _getCurrentValue already in a subclass.  
> (But
> then again, we would face the same problem when introducing
> _getCurrentValue in general.)
>
> The interface for _getFormValue remains stable and the code didn't
> change. The only thing that changed is that the responsibility of
> retrieving the value and converting it to it's form representation was
> split over two methods instead of a single.

Hm, ok.  That does sound more workable than the skim of the diff  
appeared.  (FWIW, we also have the internal evidence of backwards  
compatibility that our private and public packages didn't need to be  
adjusted for this change.)

I'll +1 this.  :-)

Thanks, Christian!

Gary