Ownable should support setting the initial owner through its constructor

🧐 Motivation Currently Ownable force you to set the initial owner to be the msg sender. This brings a dependence on the account that deploy the contract, which is often not the same as the expected owner of the contract. For security it is often better to ensure the account making deployment do not have any responsibility.

it also brings issue when you need to deploy the contract through a factory where the factory become the defacto owner of the contract.

While contracts using Ownable could call transferOwnership this would trigger another event.

It would be better if Ownable constructor had a owner parameter so contract using Ownable can decide whose address is going to be the initial owner

[Amxx]

Hello @wighawag

This feature has already been requested multiple times. In a perfect world, solidity would support optional arguments, and we would be able to use the provided value or fallback to initializing using msg.sender. Unfortunately, overloading constructor is not yet a thing.

While the change you ask for is easy to do, and make a lot of sense, it would also be a breaking change. Any contract that uses Ownable right now (and there are many!) would not be compatible with the newer version, and this would require users to change their code. We want to avoid this, and we certainly cannot do such a change in a minor version.

We might possibly consider this for whenever we release contracts 5.0, but until then, calling transferOwnership in the constructor is the way to go. While it is true that there are 2 events, the 2 are consistent with the ownership logic, so they should not be to confusing for an outside observer.

[Amxx]

Its is always possible to call _transferOwnership(admin) in the constructor so I don’t think its that critical

But yes, we should consider weither we want to change that for the next major.