[Zope-dev] A Modest Proposal Concerning Monkey Patches

[R. David Murray]

On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, Casey Duncan wrote:
> That is why it would be beneficial to make the thing being patched extensible
> in the first place thereby alleviating the need to patch it.

This is a very good point.  Now that we have comitters outside
zope corp, Product authors probably ought to think of this as
an opportunity to refactor the base zope code.  In other words,
if you need to monkey patch, instead refactor the code so that
there's a hook you can use, and submit the patch for inclusion in
the next version of zope.  Then you can monkey patch if you need
to make your product work with the current zope version, but you
won't have to worry about upgrade issues.

--RDM