Re: colorls in base

[Phil Rulon <pjr%zephyrite.net@localhost>]

maya%netbsd.org@localhost writes:
> There's a topic on peace-keeping in a large project.
>
> There are two types of feedback:
>
> - "this change makes the code simpler and twice as fast" (it's
>   objectively better)
> - "I like colorful terminals" (my personal opinion)
>
> Objecting to a diff like this causes friction. I like Rin, and I don't
> want him to get the habit that his changes are unwelcome. So I try to
> avoid unnecessary complaints on things that are personal taste.
>
> Bikeshed type discussions in general are very draining, and topics that
> are accessible to a wide audience like color in shell commands are prone
> to them.
>
> When your complaint is:
> - The default 16 color scheme includes colors that aren't legible to my
>   colorblind self, and excessive use of color by defaults hurts terminal
>   legibility for me.
>
> It's objective feedback, and I hope we don't default to a colorful
> terminal without addressing it (since doing so is a lot harder, I don't
> expect this to happen).

I won't use a feature such as this.  Hopefully that will not be difficult.

I do encourage active development in base, to make it as useful as possible.
I've used this system for 20 years largely because of its simplicity and
adherence to conservative feature adoption - unlike that other system.

My main concern is the use of resources.  There are loads of things to be
done, as can be seen on the projects page.  Is this as high a priority as
some of the listed projects?  I suspect not.

Developer enthusiasm is a precious resource.  It's bad karma for a person
to trash another's idea simply because s?he will never use it.  This
thread has been to the Styx on that.  That's unfortunate.

I'm using as much of base as I can these days, and as little of pkgsrc as
possible.  It's a research project - to find out where base can be made
better.  Perhaps the hack being discussed here will mean that base is more
useful to others as well. That would be a good result.

I would suggest a thoughtful consideration of default colors.  Lots of
folks have adopted white backgrounds for terminal windows, some old
fossils like me, are still using black.

Carry on,
pjr