Brian Kirsch, Morgen Sagen, Grant Baillie, Ted Leung, Katie Capps Parlante,
John Anderson and I just had a brief meeting regarding the "unified
displayName" discussion from April (see also bug #1745).
The background of the issue is that Brian was concerned about developers
localizing displayName unnecessarily for schema items, when that name is
almost never actually displayed. Brian's outstanding patch for bug #1745
attempted to fix this by creating a new "title" attribute and using it in
addition to displayName.
In discussion at the meeting, however, it became clear that there is no
apparently-valid use case for having a displayName at all. The original
intent of displayName was to have a single, universal attribute that could
be used for an item's user-visible name. However, in today's Chandler
there are different uses for names of different items, and (it would
appear) no reason to continue centralizing this in the repository.
So, the consensus reached was to:
1. Use application-specific attributes for UI display, with the most
prominent example being a new "ContentItem.title" attribute.
2. Remove "displayName" from the schema API and the repository, as the
attribute should no longer have any special meaning or function, nor in
fact exist at all.
The current action plan is as follows:
1. John will investigate remaining uses of displayName that are actually
being shown in the UI, and add/use the 'title' attribute of ContentItem in
place of 'displayName'. This attribute will be indexed.
2. Brian Kirsch will review John's patch for i18n issues
3. I will remove displayName from the schema API
4. Andi will remove it from the repository code and core schema definition.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Open Source Applications Foundation "chandler-dev" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/chandler-dev
