Re: Unified appearance of Comments-tab and History-tab

-- cross-posting to user's list. please reply to dev list only. --

-- this thread discusses a proposal for a new history tab layout --


> So now we have to decide what we do or? +1 for a font without serifs,
> and +1 for a revert of the change or an enhancement in font and style so
> mick can't complain anymore.

Is a vote necessary yet? Cant we continue until we all reach a consensus 
on the smart solution :-)
Problems with voting is that it disenfranchises those voted against. It 
also encourages lazy behaviour, overriding those that spend time to 
dissect and discuss the problems and merits.

Currently, to my understanding, people liking the new style are Ronny, 
Johannes. Killi, and Torsten. 

(( It's my opinion these people have been jira-ised ;-) ))

But both Johannes, Torsten, and myself have resistance to the change 
having been done so quickly and/or without a broader community opinion.

No answer from Jorge or Hussayn yet.

So the tide seems largely against me at this point.
Let me try one more time, please bear with me.

The discussion largely i feel has focused on style, appearance, and 
similarity to other systems. We've already invalidated the last point so 
please be objective to that.

I don't feel that style or appearance here is important one bit, sorry, 
because the history tab is not the front page of any issue. It's purpose 
is _purely_ functional. Nobody goes to the history tab to see the current 
state of an issue or to read the latest version of any comments. 

People go there to
 a) go through the issue's state lifecycle, or
 b) read previous versions of comments/text fields.

These two objectives should be what we focus on in finding the best 
layout. Because of (a) i've tended towards a solution that can isolate 
attribute changes away from reasons/comments/long-text-attribute changes. 
I definitely don't think that the original layout does this properly 
either.

Now some more screenshots of the various history tabs.
I'm also unsure as to how many have realised there are in fact 3 separate 
history tabs to choose decide between! There are have been two changes in 
trunk since 0.21 both from Ronny. I've added a fourth as the new history 
tab has a few serious layout issues.

Try and go through them using the usecases:
 1) find who set the assignee role,
 3) find when was the issue closed? 
 4) find who set the version attribute?

From 0.21
http://wever.org/Screenshot-Scarab-version1.png
Ronny's first revamp
http://wever.org/Screenshot-Scarab-version2.png
Ronny's second revamp
http://wever.org/Screenshot-Scarab-version3.png
Second revamp cleaned up
http://wever.org/Screenshot-Scarab-version3-fixed.png

Version3 is unusable in my opinion.
And note that version3-fixed takes up the most space.

There was also the suggestion for a combination of version1 & version3 
keeping the date-author heading-row for each changeset but for the body 
having two columns Actions + Reason like in version1. 


But if we do move away from version1, then i hope that in some way we can 
better highlight/distinguish the differences between individual changes 
in each changeset to make manually searching the history for a particular 
attribute change quicker.

~mck

-- 
"A mind that has been stretched will never return to it's original
dimension." Albert Einstein
| www.semb.wever.org | www.sesat.no | www.sesam.no |