[OPEN-ILS-DEV] The future of the craftsman skin

[Dan Scott]

There have been a number of recent commits to Evergreen (trunk - no
changes are proposed here for 1.6) that have de-emphasized the role of
the craftsman skin:

  * http://svn.open-ils.org/trac/ILS/changeset/17076 - "segregate the
old version of facet-modified JS to be craftsman-specific" which mostly
duplicates several thousand lines of JavaScript code in order to
preserve some level of functionality for craftsman - albeit far behind
the "default" skin

  * http://svn.open-ils.org/trac/ILS/changeset/17096 - the most recent
commit changes the default skin back to "default" from "craftsman" so
that the most functional skin is what potential new adopters will see
when they finish installing Evergreen

This is in the context of the craftsman skin being broken in trunk for
some time now, along with a number of long-standing display problems
that have never quite been fixed.

At this point, it seems that the bold craftsman experiment, for whatever
reason, isn't working out. Patches to fix craftsman problems have been
few and far between, and the focus of Evergreen developers seems to be
almost entirely on the "default" skin. (One possible cause is that we
don't maintain a canonical list of the document structure and IDs that
rdetail.js and friends depend on, so when a new requirement gets added
to the "default" skin, it's only via debugging or closely watching
commits that one can work out what needs to be fixed in another skin
such as craftsman - and that's an issue not just for craftsman, but for
any other skin in the wild).

As a result, I would like to call for volunteers willing to maintain
craftsman. In my opinion the ideal approach would be to work towards
getting back to a state where separate, divergent copies of rdetail.js &
friends are not required. As part of the process, these volunteers could
hopefully create that canonical list of document structure / IDs (in the
hopes that other skins would have a chance of being viable), and / or
eventually refactor the getting-long-in-the-tooth custom Ajax code to
let Dojo do the heavy lifting.

If we do not find volunteers willing to maintain craftsman, or the
volunteers aren't able to contribute the patches necessary to bring it
into respectable shape, then I will subsequently propose moving
craftsman into the ILS-Contrib Subversion repository
(http://svn.open-ils.org/trac/ILS-Contrib) where it will at least have a
chance of living on and being resurrected at some point.