Common parent class for User and AnonymousUser

[jag@…]

Howdy!

While I know of and respect Django's deference to Pythonic duck-typing, it would be helpful for isinstance(obj, klass) to confirm whether an object is a user or not, regardless of authentication. However User inherits solely from models.Model and AnonymousUser inherits from object -- they have no common lineage despite common interface.

This patch creates an abstract parent class for both User and AnonymousUser so a check for isinstance(obj, django.contrib.auth.models.UserClass) returns True whether the user is authenticated or not.

It provides this functionality without any other modification to the external interface, so there are no side-effects or other impacts of this change. I've tested it against the Django test suite and it passes.

-jag

[Joshua "jag" Ginsberg <jag@…>]

Patchfile

[Joshua "jag" Ginsberg <jag@…>]

Forgive my daftness -- the first patchfile was the wrong version and should be deleted from the ticket.

[Jacob]

Generally we look down upon abstract base classes in Python and Django. That's especially true when the base class doesn't actually provide any functionality. So while I appreciate your desire to use isinstance/issubclass, this patch just doesn't fit.