Forum OpenACS Development: Canonical Way to Instantiate and Mount a Package

I am working on auto-mount feature discussed in this thread:

https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=70889

and I'm having some problems figuring out what the preferred way of creating a package instance and mounting it in the site map is.

It turns out that currently, OpenACS has at least three approaches to doing this:

1. apm_package_instantiate_and_mount Only used in acs-bootstrap-installer/installer/auto-install.tcl Does not update cache, does not invoke callbacks. I've removed this proc (not committed yet).

2. subsite::auto_mount_application, that invokes site_node_mount_application, that invokes site_node_apm_integration::new_site_node_and_package. This seems to do the right things (takes care of cache and callbacks). This proc will also make sure the name of the node to mount the instance is unique. This proc is only invoked on the auto-mount page in the subsite admin UI. As far as I can tell this page is nowhere linked to in the system.

3. site_node_create_package_instance. A deprecated proc that seems to do exactly what the procs 2 above do. The proc is used on the package-new page in the site-map admin UI and this page is actually used. So as it turns out this last deprecated proc (that fortunately seems to do the right thing) is the only one that most people ever use.

What I propose is removing procs 2 altogether and to make auto-install.tcl (proc 1) use proc 3. We can enhance the argument handling of site_node_create_package_instance so that all you must provide is the package_key. We would also undeprecate the proc and move it into the site_node:: namespage.

What do you think?

The site_node_apm_integration namespace has about four procs in it, are these used elsewhere?  It looks like the intent was to provide all mounting/deletion facilities there.  It seems that this functionality should just be part of the site_node namespace.  If the site_node namespace doesn't provide that functionality perhaps it should be moved over from site_node_apm_integration?

Whether you move proc #2 or proc #3 over doesn't much matter since they essentially are doing the same thing (the cache appears to be updated by proc #3 despite the lack of an explicit call to do so).

If you have time to clean these namespaces up and make things more consistent, in addition to simply fixing stuff as you're doing, it would be *greatly* appreciated!

Well, I use site_node_mount_application and I think the ability to simply mount a package at an existing site node should be retained, but don't have an opinion on the others.

I would like to see the function names (and namespace) rationalized a little (which is I guess what yon started and which is why that proc is deprecated).