Tim,

First off, thank you for taking the time to respond here, I know you 
have a lot on your plate right now, and I hope things are going well for 
you. I did not mean to call you out as having made a mistake as much as 
I wanted to point to examples of what kinds of changes have been made 
based on what I feel are misunderstandings.

On 9/29/10 6:28 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
> On 30/09/10 08:27, Trevor Parscal wrote:
>>    There seems to be some confusion about how ResourceLoader works, which
>> has been leading people to make commits like r73196 and report bugs like
>> #25362. I would like to offer some clarification.
> I made that change because it was requested by multiple people in
> discussions before the resource loader was implemented. It's not
> because I actually had any actual problem with debugging, I'm well
> aware of the existence of the debug mode.
>
Your responsiveness to the community is admirable, but I feel this may 
be a case where more collaborative discussion should have taken place 
before action was taken. Nonetheless, I appreciate your boldness, even 
if I disagree with the action taken.
> Concerns were raised that it may be necessary to interpret minified
> code in cases such as:
>
> * Where it is suspected that, due to caching issues, the debug code
> may not be the same as the minified code.
Shift+refresh?
> * To debug the minifier itself, which is far short of a full
> JavaScript parser and may well introduce functional differences.
If JSMin is causing the bug, then it will be best detected by seeing 
that debug=true/false have different behavior, not that debug=true 
contains line breaks.
> * Where end users report platform-specific JavaScript errors, it may
> be useful to be able to match the line number of the error with
> something meaningful.
The usefulness of this is attached to the idea the most important part 
of the error message is the line number. In some browsers (such as many 
versions of IE) the line numbers aren't even correct. Besides, as I have 
said already, over and over, combination is going to throw off line 
numbers anyways, not just making them higher, but depending on the 
user's preferences they may be totally different from one user to 
another. Line numbers in production mode (debug=false) are useless no 
matter how much white-space is preserved.
> Since the cost of adding line breaks is fairly small, the contention
> was that it was a fair compromise between size and developer (and tech
> supporter) sanity. So I took those comments on board and implemented
> it shortly after the branch merge.
We should probably calculate just how small that cost is before we start 
making asumptions based on it being "fairly small". Also, as I have been 
saying, the production mode (debug=false) is only going to become more 
optimized in the future, further reducing the value of line numbers.

I am not meaning to argue with *you* on a point-by-point basis as much 
as I'm arguing with the originators of these points. I get the feeling 
that, while you may understand how resource loader works, they may not.

My top priorities are to make the site as high-performance as possible 
while maintaining a reasonable level of developer friendliness. These 
are on opposite ends of the spectrum, and middle ground serves neither well.

- Trevor
> -- Tim Starling
>
>
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