Re: New CF app deployment

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 9:46 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 3:24 PM, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net>
> wrote:
> > Yes, and the agreement after that feedback was to try it out and then
> figure
> > out what changes were needed? As about half the feedback said it was
> better
> > without and half said it was better with.
>
> Well, I can't speak to anyone else's opinion, but I'm quite sure I
> raised the issue that we need a way to call out which messages in the
> thread are important, and I think that's pretty much what Peter is
> saying, too. I find the new tool essentially unusable - having one
> link to the whole thread instead of individual links to just the
> important messages in that thread is a huge regression for me, as is
> the lack of the most recent activity on the summary page. I don't
> know how much more feedback than that you need to be convinced, but
> I'm going to shut up now before I say something I will later regret.
>
>
So in an attempt to actually move this forward in a constructive way I'm
going to ignore a bunch of what happened after this email, and fork the
discussion at this point.

Since it's pretty clear that several people, many of who are definitely
more productive pg developers than me (and some of the others who
specifically said they did not want this feature), have spoken up about it
*after* the release of it (there's no point in arguing who said what
beforehand), we should look into doing that.

First of all - assuming we'lI fix this particular thing. Are there *other*
things that you would also say makes the tool "essentially unusable"?
Because if there are, can we get that out of the way early? I wouldn't want
to spend a bunch of time fixing this, just to get back into the same round
of argument again, and basically the only thing that's accepted is a
rollback. Because if that's what people want, then let's rollback - I'm not
going to waste time on it in that case. (I'm equally not going to spend
time on fixing anything on the old one anymore, so the next time there's a
security issue or such around it, it will be shut down until someone fixes
it - but that's still better than a tool people don't like to use)

Second, so let's look at how to actually do this.

What kind of annotation are we actually talking about here? Are you looking
for something that's basically "star a message" (like you'd do in a MUA in
a lot of cases)? Or "assign tag" (from a set of - editable of course -
pre-existing tags). Or a complete free-text field?

Then, what do you need to be able to annotate on?

Right now the app only shows messages that actually have attachments on
them, assuming that you'd want to read the whole thread if you want to look
at other things. For this reason, for the message thread itself it only
keeps track of the first and last message (so you can know when it has
updated). Are you saying you want to be able to attach an annotation to
*any* message in the thread? If so, we'd have to pull in and show every
single message on the thread in the UI - I'm thinking that might become
more than a little cluttered in a lot of cases. If that is what you're
talking about, any suggestions for how to actually make that into an UI
that's not that cluttered?

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/