great progress on dive site handling

Linus Torvalds torvalds at linux-foundation.org
Sat Jun 27 18:51:20 PDT 2015


On Sat, Jun 27, 2015 at 6:32 PM, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
>
> I guess we simply and fundamentally disagree on what a reasonable workflow
> would be. And you would never, ever, EVER think that what you propose was
> reasonable in this scenario:
>
> You have a dive site named Fishbowl, but you don't have GPS data for it.
> You have a dive site Fishpool that has GPS data.
> You're on a dive at Fishpool.
> You think "hey, that was Fishbowl, wasn't it" and switch to that. Now
> Fishbowl has Fishpool's GPS data.
> WHAT THE FUCK?

Nobody wants that, btw. You're making a complete red herring argument.

What people want to do is to edit the name of the dive site.

YOU seem to think that the name is the most important part, and the
"key" to the dive site. That's completely bogus. You can have a
thousand dive sites with the same name, and I can pretty much
guarantee that exists. Things like "Blue hole" are all over the world,
as are dive sites named "Fish Rock" or "Boat Harbor".

So in your upside-down world, when you pick a name, you switch to the
GPS coordinates for that name. And that's pure *crap*. Really. Exactly
because names are not unique, and never will be.

Any dive site management that keys by name is broken and completely
unfixably so. And yes, that very much includes the current "select
dive site by name" model that you have. It's *wrong*. You can't do it.

Your model where you select by name is simply not fixable.

So what I'm saying is that the really unique thing about a dive site
isn't the name, it's the GPS coordinates. If you have GPS coordinates
for a dive, that's fixed. But you then may well want to name those GPS
coordinates. So when you write the name, it absolutely should *not*
move the dive site. Because it turns out that the dive site named
"Boat Hardbor" outside of Lanai, Hawaii, isn't actually the same dive
site as "Boat Harbor" in Buffalo, NY.

I argued for making all the dive site handling key off off the GPS
coordinates, but you've made the name the important thing. You select
a "name", and cannot even see what the lcoation infomation is for that
name (try subsurface on my current repository, and look for "Mala
Pier". I know I have GPS coordinates for "Mala Pier", but if I pick
it, your name-based thing will pick a dive site with no GPS
coordinates.

                   Linus


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