[openstack-dev] [nova][all] Architecture Diagrams in ascii art?

Joshua Harlow harlowja at outlook.com
Wed May 13 21:36:48 UTC 2015


Dolph Mathews wrote:
> Developers can handle ASCII. Developers can't handle steel blue versus
> cornflower blue.
>
> But seriously, graphics collaboratively authored by developers should,
> ideally, be editable via a text file. Otherwise they won't be maintained.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that if people don't have the 
motivation to open a program such as dia[1] (which is opensource and 
available for mac/linux/windows) and edit a diagram there I'm not 
exactly sure they'll have a motivation to open a text file either...

Lazy (or unmotivated) people will be lazy (or unmotivated) no matter 
what u provide them...

[1] http://dia-installer.de/

>
> On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 8:31 PM, Devananda van der Veen
> <devananda.vdv at gmail.com <mailto:devananda.vdv at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Woops. I missed most of this thread in my last reply.
>
>     I'm all for using open standard formats and versioning them.
>     However. Not being a graphical artist myself, I have found the
>     learning curve on some of those tools daunting, eg. inkscape, which
>     means I'm far less likely to update a graphic in a format that
>     requires me to go learn that tool first. Also, it's awkward to
>     require a Python developer to update an SVG because that is
>     "documentation" affected by their commit.
>
>     If we go with a common tool/format like libre office/ODF. I suggest
>     we adopt some commonalities, and still keep things simple enough
>     that we can reasonably expect any developer to update it.
>
>     -D
>
>     On May 12, 2015 12:33 PM, "Sean Dague" <sean at dague.net
>     <mailto:sean at dague.net>> wrote:
>
>         On 05/12/2015 01:12 PM, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
>          > On 2015-05-12 10:04:11 -0700 (-0700), Clint Byrum wrote:
>          >> It's a nice up side. However, as others have pointed out,
>         it's only
>          >> capable of displaying the most basic pieces of the architecture.
>          >>
>          >> For higher level views with more components, I don't think
>         ASCII art
>          >> can provide enough bandwidth to help as much as a vector
>         diagram.
>          >
>          > Of course, simply a reminder that just because you have one
>         or two
>          > complex diagram callouts in a document doesn't mean it's
>         necessary
>          > to also go back and replace your simpler ASCII art diagrams with
>          > unintelligible (without rendering) SVG or Postscript or whatever.
>          > Doing so pointlessly alienates at least some fraction of readers.
>
>         Sure, it's all about trade offs.
>
>         But I believe that statement implicitly assumes that ascii art
>         diagrams
>         do not alienate some fraction of readers. And I think that's a bad
>         assumption.
>
>         If we all feel alienated every time anyone does anything that's not
>         exactly the way we would have done it, it's time to give up and
>         pack it
>         in. :) This thread specifically mentioned source based image formats
>         that were internationally adopted open standards (w3c SVG, ISO
>         ODG) that
>         have free software editors that exist in Windows, Mac, and Linux
>         (Inkscape and Open/LibreOffice).
>
>                  -Sean
>
>         --
>         Sean Dague
>         http://dague.net
>
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