[ckan-discuss] Groups -> themes?

Mon Dec 9 19:42:12 UTC 2013

On 09.12.2013 18:39, Mark Wainwright wrote:
>> I'm with Adria on this. I was against using groups and organizations as
>> the names, but now that we have them, I say we call a moratorium on
>> renaming features in CKAN until after we've purged the word "package"
>> from all code and docs!
>
> Hmm, I don't know that such behind-the-scenes purging is as important
> as a good UI, but anyway, surely 'after we've purged the word
> "package"' is the *worst* possible time to go tinkering with other
> terms in the UI - since it's then too late to purge them from the code
> and docs at the same time.

It's really hard to purge a word like group or package from CKAN 
completely (the word group appears in the ckan code tens of thousands of 
times). It'd be a really big change that would take ages and be really 
disruptive to other work on the code. Changing multiple words at the 
same time would be even worse.

So what you'd probably end up with is what we have with package/dataset: 
the word package may not appear in the web UI anymore, but as soon as 
the user hits the command-line interface, config file, API, writing 
extensions or themes, or working on the source code, they come across it.

I think it's quite messy to have this with one major feature, having it 
with two or three would be really messy. Imagine having to always 
remember (and explain to new CKAN developers) that datasets are also 
called packages, themes are also called groups, and publishers are also 
called organizations.

I agree they names are bad but the cost of changing them now is high.