[development] Have you ever laughed fate in the face?

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

Neil Drumm wrote:
> Chad Phillips -- Apartment Lines wrote:
>> just to put everybody in the loop here: chx and i have been discussing
>> the idea of a deletion API for drupal core, which would address killes'
>> modular concerns as regards this functionality, as well as allow us to
>> break out all the confirm code into a seperate module.  what this means
>> is that site admins would have the following options for a deletion
>> workflow:
>>
>> 1. the current scheme: no trashbin, with confirm screens
>> 2. trashbin with confirm screens
>> 3. trashbin with no confirm screens
>> 4. no trashbin, no confirm screens (for those who like to live dangerously!)
>>
>> simply enable or disable either of the confirm.module or trashbin.module
>> to get the desired combination.
> 
> Why do we need the ability to enable or disable trashbins or confirm
> screens? Are there any precedents or conventions for this in other
> software, web or otherwise? What group of users who might want this? [1]


I have requested that Drupal be made more modular so that people who 
want it can use Chad's trashbin.module and people who don't (me) don't 
need to bloat their Drupal by a largish amount of code.


> - New user: shouldn't have to think about delete workflows, would rather
> be doing more tangible things to learn and use Drupal.
> - Web developer: probably not concerned about delete workfows, it
> doesn't help the deadline.
> - Site maintainer: not concerned with delete workflows, it isn't
> day-to-day maintenance.
> - Power user: might be concerned with delete workflows, if a client asks.
> 
> This isn't good for consistency either. More and more people are using
> multiple Drupal sites. Different delete workflows following identical
> buttons on different sites will lead to confusion [2]. In this case,
> confusion could be disastrous.

No Drupal site is the same as any other. With the same argument you 
could argue against things like form API's ability to put in new fields 
into preexisting forms. Yet you didn't, IIRC.

> Instead, I think we should set up guidelines for deletion. Here is a draft:

Sorry, no. Your guidelines might be right for your site(s) but wrong for 
mine, they might be right in one culture and wrong in multiple others.

Drupal has long enough suffered from things like, "I don't think we'll 
ever need this (on drupal.org)".

We should not strive to take choices away from people who want to build 
websites.

Cheers,
	Gerhard