On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 11:04 AM, Chad <innocentkiller(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I highly doubt we'll get guaranteed backlash over
such a minor shift in diff colors.
Heh....ha ha ha ha....(*uncontrollable laughter*)
Sorry, we will, but not because we should. Pretty much any design
change anyone makes runs a substantial risk of endless bikeshedding.
While there are only a handful of people that care about the
difference between database query strategies or parameter ordering in
functions, pretty much everyone who interacts with the product will
have an opinion about what it will look like. The colors, the
ordering of the layout, the whole bit.
Calling it a bikeshed argument probably diminishes the importance of
it a bit too much. The colors are important. What the user interface
looks like matters a great deal.
The question, though, is what is the best way of dealing with user
interface design issues? Many of us know that as non-designers, while
we may have opinions on these things, they probably don't matter.[1]
To make matters worse, there are going to be a lot of things that are
truly a matter of taste. So, someone is going to need to make the
call, because there's no way to arrive at "The Truth". We can do what
most open source projects have done all along, which is to leave it up
to the last developer that touches the code. That's a fine way of
guaranteeing that what we end up with is going to be a hodge-podge of
a lot of really bad stuff, combined with a few things that would be
good if they were applied consistently and we committed to that
particular direction. However, those good things won't be so good
since they won't be applied consistently, since it'll be the taste of
whoever happens to be around that will be applied.
No one has declared Brandon the dictator of these things, nor has
anyone declared that we're throwing consensus out the window.
However, it's hard to imagine Brandon being able to do anything other
than this type of conversation if every decision he makes needs to be
justified and discussed to the level that this diff color discussion
happened. Furthermore, Brandon ends up dealing with the consequences
for design decisions that he isn't consulted on, which is why we need
to make sure that we consult him, and be prepared to go along even if
we disagree. The "right" answer is often the most consistent answer,
and our odds of achieving consistency go up if we defer to one person
for issues that are matters of taste.
There's a few other issues tagged "design" in code review, and there
are likely to be more:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/tag/design
Brandon is going to be weighing in on those as well, possibly making
changes in the code based on his opinions on those. Can we please, oh
please, not spin up a monster debate about each of those others?
Please?
Thanks
Rob
[1]
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/this-is-what-happens-when-you-let-…