AuthServiceProvider contains unused method Policies()

[cthorne91]

I was working on my AuthServiceProvider refactoring a large array assignment to the $policies property at the top of the file. I came across something that looked broken inside the framework's AuthServiceProvider, but I wanted to check with the community to see if I am overlooking something.

Long story short, overwriting the framework's AuthServiceProvider's public function policies() inside my own AuthServiceProvider never gets called and so has no purpose as far as I can see. I would love to be able to overwrite the policies() function and return an array based on some logic.

The framework's AuthServiceProvider's public function registerPolicies() accesses the protected $policies property directly instead of requesting the property through the policies() method.

Seems like it would make sense to update the following line 24 to $this->policies() as opposed to $this->policies? Hope I'm making sense.

framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Support/Providers/AuthServiceProvider.php

Lines 17 to 27 in f7dfb60

	/**
	* Register the application's policies.
	*
	* @return void
	*/
	public function registerPolicies()
	{
	foreach ($this->policies as $key => $value) {
	Gate::policy($key, $value);
	}
	}

framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Support/Providers/AuthServiceProvider.php

Lines 37 to 45 in f7dfb60

	/**
	* Get the policies defined on the provider.
	*
	* @return array
	*/
	public function policies()
	{
	return $this->policies;
	}

I just ended up assigning the $policies property inside my boot method to get around this for now.

[staudenmeir]

The method was added as a public accessor for the protected $policies: 6d8e530

[driesvints]

It's indeed just for fetching the property values if you need it.