Re: [platform-ui-dev] New editors view

[Nick_Edgar@xxxxxxxxxx]

(you may see this message twice due to the mailing list thinking I'm a 
different person because of my change to the ca.ibm.com domain)

Jared,

The reason we rolled our own view was not due to any deficiencies in your 
implementation.  We started off implementing the drop-down, and then found 
that it was a small amount of extra work to reuse this code in a view.  I 
do apologize for not having done a better job of keeping you informed 
about this process though.

There are some technical issues with supporting some of the features your 
view has, which ours doesn't.  For example, in order to support working 
sets and the object contribution actions in the view's context menu, the 
item's underlying resource must be known.  With lazy editor activation, 
the corresponding editor, or even its editor input, may not be known.  So 
either you need to force activation in order to get these features, or you 
allow the UI to be inconsistent (sometimes you get the features, sometimes 
you don't).  Neither of these options is desirable, so we left these 
features out and are considering alternatives.

As for what you can do to get contributions accepted, I don't think you 
did anything wrong in this regard.  You developed an interesting new 
feature, and discussed with us the possibility of getting it released over 
the last several months.  Before 2.0, we were unsure whether this was the 
right approach, and had too many other priorities to consider this.  For 
the current work, we started off looking at the idea of a drop-down, but 
then realized we could also make it a view with a small amount of extra 
work.  So the main reason we rolled our own rather than including your 
code is that it was actually less work to add the view support to the 
drop-down code, than to examine your code and take out the features that 
we were not comfortable with including.  But again, I should have let you 
know we were going this route.

Finally, the recently released changes to editor management, including the 
view, are not necessarily the final answer for 2.1.  We are discussing 
other options, and may in fact end up rolling back all the changes in 
favour of a more concerted effort to improve editor management post 2.1. 
I'd feel more comfortable rolling back our own changes than somebody 
else's contribution.

Nick





Jared Burns <jared-eclipse@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: platform-ui-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx
12/06/02 02:01 PM
Please respond to platform-ui-dev

 
        To:     platform-ui-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
        cc: 
        Subject:        [platform-ui-dev] New editors view



I was tempted to send this email privately, but I imagine the answers 
could be 
generally useful.

Would someone mind explaining the problems in my EditorList view that 
prompted 
the team to create their own version of the view from scratch? Were the 
problems mostly technical (bugs, etc.), was my code not compatible with UI 

team conventions (style, architecture, etc.), or was there some other 
fundamental problem?

I'd like to know what I could have done (and what I could do in the 
future) to 
get my contribution accepted.

Thanks,
- Jared
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