[Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2

Platonides Platonides at gmail.com
Mon Jun 7 13:38:04 UTC 2010


Andrew Garrett wrote:
> I will say to be fair that the best response to what you perceive as a
> poor design choice in somebody else's code is not to revert them and
> say "There, I fixed it for you. Thank me later.", but perhaps to
> discuss it with them first and find a compromise. There's an
> imperative to listen and respond to community feedback, but quietly
> changing somebody else's code against their explicit wishes is not a
> good way to make your point.

Have you looked at r67281? That was not a revert. Given the phrase
"collapse all navs but the first" it changed it to "collapse all navs
but the first or the interwiki one". That was a bug fix, you might even
call it "fine tuning collapsiblenavs".
And it was not *me* considering it a bug. It was backed up by the
community. I wasn't trying to make a point, just trying to finally fix
it and stop the mourning. I wasn't too successful :)

However, it wasn't against their explicit wishes, since they hadn't
expressed their wishes. Had they wontfixed bug 23497, I wouldn't have
done that. Or expressed that in the bug, or this thread... It's worth
noting the lack of feedback from the team here. There were a couple of
replies by Howie after the fact, but other than those, the only coding
staff replies were from Roan and you, which incidentally come both from
the community.

It was later revealed that Trevor had been on vacation for the last 2
weeks. That can partly explain the silence. I didn't know it. Although
that could be taken a reason /for/ changing the code, too.

We are editing each other code all the time. Extensions are more
individual than eg. core, but still a one-line patch shouldn't be an issue.
It was even stated later: "Anyone is welcome to touch usability code", I
think the problem was that it was that it was "against their wishes",
which I should have somehow guessed from being non-responsive.






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