clide/decisions/rejected.md

Rejected Alternatives

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

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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• Rejected: 2026-04-20 (was ADR 0002; superseded by D-005)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

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