[development] Possibility of API *additions* post-code freeze?

[Larry Garfield]

Wasn't one of the main reasons for the pull-based forms change that you could 
do this sort of automation?  So to, eg, create a new role, you'd pull the 
role_add form, populate it, and submit it?  

I agree that's not the most approachable API for every action, especially 
primitives like "create role", but it should be doable.

On Sunday 20 August 2006 00:12, Angela Byron wrote:
> For this volunteer project I'm working on, I'm developing an install
> profile. It occurs to me that there aren't really any nice ready-made
> functions for doing a lot of basic stuff in Drupal like:
>
> - Creating a role, with a given list of permissions
> - Adding a user to a role
> - Enabling an input format
> - Turning on/off a block
> - etc.
>
> I can try and roll patches for these as I go, however this is
> something I'm doing in my "spare" time so likely I won't have
> encountered even 1/100th  of the possible optimizations by Sept 1,
> and will have time for rolling patches for very few of them, if any.
> And while I could create my own little helper module to define these,
> that means a lot of copy/paste from core which is constantly
> changing, so it makes sense for these changes to be in core. I could
> see the addition of some of these API functions also being useful for
> things like XML-RPC, and also for making it easier for people to
> create their own Drupal distributions. Erm, usability? ;)
>
> I'm wondering if it's possible to add functions like this to the API,
> and change core to use them, post-code freeze? I know we normally
> don't allow API changes, but this wouldn't be _changing_ anything,
> per se.. people calling huge_gargantuan_function($op = something)
> would still get the same behaviour. It's just that internally,
> huge_gargantuan_function would be split it up into helper functions
> that each did distinct things.
>
> Just curious. :) Thanks.
>
> -Angie

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Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
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