Files
clide/decisions/rejected.md
T
jpmschweitzerandClaude 272b59e752
test / unit + widget + golden + a11y (push) Failing after 41s
test / integration_test (xvfb) (push) Has been skipped
test / bundle smoke (xvfb 5s) (push) Has been skipped
test / daemon subprocess + web WASM smoke (push) Has been skipped
record design handoff decisions (D-043–D-045, Q-025, R-012)
D-043: adopt token palettes from design, reject Material wrapper.
D-044: four bundled themes replace summer-night.
D-045: syntax highlighting tokens in the theme pipeline.
Q-025: body text face — mono everywhere vs Josefin Sans + mono.
R-012: MaterialApp wrapper rejected (conflicts with D-007).

Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-04-22 16:11:40 +02:00

5.8 KiB

Rejected Alternatives

Alternatives considered and rejected, with rationale preserved for future reference.


R-002: Go sidecar

  • Rejected: 2026-04-20 (was ADR 0002; superseded by D-005)
  • Reason: The ADR picked Go on two premises — (a) the heavy work belongs in a language separate from the UI layer, and (b) pql is Go so muscle memory transfers. Both broke on reassessment. The sidecar stripped of PTY is I/O-bound glue that dart:io covers cleanly (unix sockets, JSON-lines framing, process tables, shell-outs). The real axis was separate process vs shared language, not Go vs Rust, and separate-process is what matters (session persistence needs the daemon to outlive the app), not language. PTY is the one place Dart is genuinely weak — Dart's multi-threaded VM can't safely fork() — and that single constraint forces a native helper regardless, independent of whether the rest of the core is Dart. Once a small native helper is accepted, the question "does everything else need to be in that same native language" answers itself: no. Go sidecar directory dissolved; ptyc (C, PTY-only, pql-peer) is the surviving native supporter tool.
  • Cross-reference: D-005

R-003: MaterialApp root

  • Rejected: 2026-04-21
  • Reason: Dragged in Material theming, default icons, and platform chrome that fought the custom three-tier theme pipeline (D-009). Every bundled theme had to override Material defaults to look like clide; the overrides were visible in widget tests as "why is this ElevatedButton colored this way."
  • Cross-reference: D-007

R-004: Flutter intl + ARB codegen for i18n

  • Rejected: 2026-04-21
  • Reason: ARB codegen is inflexible for plugin-contributed catalogs — every catalogue needs a codegen pass, every extension ships with pre-generated Dart, and runtime merging is fighting the tool. The fframe text-driven pattern reads JSON at runtime with no codegen, which fits extension-shipped catalogs cleanly.
  • Cross-reference: D-021

R-005: Patrol test runner

  • Rejected: 2026-04-21
  • Reason: Adds a dependency (violates D-031) for a capability we get from Playwright + Flutter's own semantics tree. Patrol's value proposition (native-gesture emulation) is less relevant on Linux desktop than on mobile.
  • Cross-reference: D-026

R-006: Nerd-font glyph icons

  • Rejected: 2026-04-21
  • Reason: TUI hangover from the Python-era clide under legacy/. Not desktop-native; forces a font dependency; doesn't theme consistently. Clide uses custom icon primitives (Tier 6 revisits with proper icon-set design).
  • Cross-reference: Q-017

R-007: CupertinoApp root

  • Rejected: 2026-04-21
  • Reason: iOS-opinionated; wrong shell for a Linux-primary desktop IDE. Same theming-collision problem as R-003.
  • Cross-reference: D-007

R-008: Riverpod / Provider / BLoC for state

  • Rejected: 2026-04-21
  • Reason: Violates D-031. ChangeNotifier + ListenableBuilder ship in the SDK, fake trivially, and cover the state model we need. The ergonomic wins of Riverpod / Provider don't clear the "new dependency" bar at clide's scale.
  • Cross-reference: D-010

R-009: Port planning tooling into clide

  • Rejected: 2026-04-21
  • Reason: Earlier in the planning session the assumption was "clide owns Dart subcommands for decisions + tickets." That breaks the day a contributor works in a terminal or in VS Code / JetBrains — they have no clide binary to run. Reversing: pql owns planning long-term (see D-039); clide consumes via shell-out.
  • Cross-reference: D-039

R-010: Python-script stopgap under tooling/db/

  • Rejected: 2026-04-21
  • Reason: Location, not language. Settled-reach puts scripts at tooling/db/ — copying that path here creates a script-pollution problem: every project using the pattern commits its own copy. The accepted Python port (D-040) lives at tools/scripts/plan, clearly signalled as dev-tooling and time-limited.
  • Cross-reference: D-040

R-011: Permanent stopgap

  • Rejected: 2026-04-21
  • Reason: If the Python port under tools/scripts/plan outlasts pql's feature parity, delete it. The deletion commit should be one changeset: remove tools/scripts/plan, remove its Makefile target (decisions-validate rewires to pql decisions validate), add a CHANGELOG.md entry under Removed, and verify .pql/pql.db still opens under the new pql binary.
  • Cross-reference: D-040

R-012: MaterialApp wrapper from design handoff

  • Rejected: 2026-04-22
  • Reason: The design handoff delivers theme files as MaterialApp/ThemeData Dart classes. This is the delivery format of claude.ai/design, not a design intent. Adopting Material's widget system would contradict D-007 (bare WidgetsApp, no Material/Cupertino). We translate the palette tokens and syntax roles into our existing YAML + SurfaceTokens pipeline.
  • Cross-reference: D-043