Location, location, location

[Rodrigo Severo]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 2:56 PM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds at linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 6:38 AM, Rick Walsh <rickmwalsh at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I see the benefit of the autocomplete to create a new site with the same
>> name as an existing site isn't so much that it saves a few keystrokes, but
>> that it is explicitly either creating a new site or assigning a dive to an
>> existing site.  It helps avoid confusion.
>
> Not just confusion. It gets rid of special cases.

I believe I understand now why your use cases seem so alien to me.
It's all about the idea that there should be more than one dive site
with the same name on Subsurface.

You clearly believe there should:
1. either because the local name is the same and you want the the dive
site name in Subsurface to be just the local name;
2. or because you want the same dive site to appear several times with
different GPS fixes because you are not sure of the GPS fix.

I don't want to have 2 dive sites with the same name on Subsurface at
all. Never.

When dealing with common dive sites (case 1 above) I do some
distinction on then like:
- Blue Hole, Niquelândia/GO, Brasil
- Blue Hole, Nobres/MT, Brasil
- Blue Hole, FL, USA
- Blue Hole, Belize

I really don't want to have several different sites named just "Blue
Hole" in Subsurface, one in the center of Brazil, the other on the
southwest of Brazil, one in Florida and the other on the Caribbean
sea. And just by looking at their name I want to be sure about which
dive site I'm dealing with.

The second reason you seem to want different dive sites with the same
name is that they actually are the same dive site but you want several
GPS fixes for it. I might decide to change the GPS fix for a dive site
but I certainly want that all occurrences of that dive site to share
this new GPS fix. The idea of having several dive sites with the same
name about a kilometer apart when they actually are the same dive site
is rather strange to me. If I were to deal with this situation
(wanting several GPS fixes for the same dive site) I would start to
name them "Fix 1", "fix 2" etc until I finally decide for a final fix
and them go back to having just one dive site with that name with all
occurrences sharing the same GPS fix.

If Subsurface is to support the idea of different dive sites with the
same exact name as you like, I believe all this mess and special cases
you mention might make some sense. I just don't think this idea is
intuitive at all. It never even occurred to me.

> I don't think the people who complain have really used the old
> subsurface location model with the GPS information very much. Or if
> you did use it, you didn't realize how subtle it was, and what kind of
> odd internal tricks it did.

Now that you mention it, I see that my feeling that Subsurface was
doing tricks on me was real.

These tricks on the old code might deal well with several of these
special situations created by the idea of having different dive sites
with the same name.

If you start to deal with the dive site name as a unique identifier,
all these special cases simply disappear. I understand that from now
on you would have to make some distinction on the name of several
"Blue Hole" dive sites you probably have but I really don't think
these distinctions would be strange of artificial at all as the ones I
use aren't.

Unfortunately I know I'm suggesting a much more radical change in
Subsurface than just the location interface but please keep in mind
that all these tricks to deal with dive sites with the same Subsurface
internal names might make lots of sense to the way you deal with dive
site naming but they are completely disruptive for other naming
strategies.

In this simpler Subsurface I envision, a new name is always a new dive
site. The same name is always the same dive site as the other(s) with
the same name. If I edit a GPS fixes of a dive site, all occurrences
of that dive site are also changed because they are the same actually.

And now back to the messy
having-the-same-name-in-subsurface-means-nothing-as-they-might-be-different-dive-sites-or-not
world we actually live in.


Rodrigo Severo