UI First
I 100% agree! Let’s make it UI first. Let’s make sure that everything works in the UI, please.
Now, let’s make it like Lovelace dashboards. Do you want to “edit manually”? At your own risk, expect the system to break, expect lesser support for you and more problems.
However, do you see benefits on it? Let me enable you to use YAML!
Cost of Maintenance
Let’s also make configuration.yaml optional to avoid burden on those who don’t want to implement it. Let’s not add burden to people.
However, a contributor wants to add a simple fix like the Adapter Pattern above? Let’s encourage it!
It’s the best of both, not either or that we are asking for.
That’s a good solution. It is harder to implement centrally as the translations may not map 1:1; but if they do, then it’s definitely doable and one of the solutions. Doing it per solution can bring a bit more of nuances into it, but both are possible.
Has any of this been considered during ADR-0010? Can it be considered and discussed?
I am happy to continue the discussions in another post, if we are not allowed to discuss ADR-0010 on the community/blog post about it. However, I wanted to make clear that these were not unrelated to the main thread or related to custom components; but actual arguments to the main discussion here.
I have also submitted another one with a potential solution which advocates for reusing the same schema, set up and partially rely on UI to solve most or all of the problems with the “cost of maintenance”.
There are also alternative proposals. If you have your ideas, you should also feel encouraged to bring them.
Harmony (example) still supports YAML as per documentation and code. I have not seen any notifications on my system that this is deprecated or the entity has been migrated.
However, YAML changes will no longer reflect on the system. I’ve done the following test:
Restarted system, for YAML configuration to update.
UI still shows 0.4.
As per my discussions with OnFreund, this seems to mean that my entities have been ported from YAML to UI. However, I do not think I have received any notification on my system about it; and, as stated, this component still supports YAML.
If I was a user who do not check Blog or Community, how was I supposed to pick this up?
This feels broken and not working as intended. Can someone else replicate this?
You understand that the UI and Yaml are separate configurations correct? I.E. UI does not impact yaml and yaml does not impact UI. You as a user choose one or the other, not both.
Now, I have never configured Harmony on the UI, or clicked any migrations. My configuration is solely YAML.
Additionally, Harmony still has configuration available for YAML, as you have happily copied from the documentation.
As such, why do I have the UI if “yaml does not impact UI”? The entity was migrated from YAML to UI without my changes. At the moment, I have my configuration.yaml where I still have my configuration, but this configuration is useless. I do not have any messages telling me or confirming that my entities have been migrated.
There are many integrations that due to the deprecation of yaml are having their yaml configuration automatically imported into the UI. Then after that their yaml config is completely ignored.
The most recent one I remember that affected me was the ZHA integration. In my system it is displayed as a UI configuration but I never migrated anything to the UI and my configuration.yaml still contains my zha: config. And as a test I just removed the zha: section from my manual config and the UI config is still there and my devices still work.
Yes, that was the point I was trying to make. Once it has been imported (without confirmation or, apparently, notification), your YAML is redeemed useless. It’s still there, you may think it works, but it doesn’t. And this is not just when YAML has been deprecated. Harmony still supports YAML, but my entities have been migrated; so the changes are not being reflected.
With pleasure. Given the fact that I was talking about that migration and you didn’t point out to the fact that we are doing forced migrations without notifications to users (on their system, since not everyone may read the Blog/Community), I thought that it was still worth bringing to everyone’s attention.
They do, though. YAML will create UI entities if the import method is present. Also, apparently, some changes (e.g. host field) may trigger a new UI configuration (I have not verified, but it was stated on the GitHub entry as well).
This is confusing for users for two reasons:
Users may not have received a message about this. I know some components log about the migration/deprecation, but that does not seem the case with Harmony; so probably also not others. And not every user may check the Blog.
Some components still support YAML. As such, a user may change the YAML configuration of one component (e.g Harmony) and it would not work; but changing others may. Without additional context (e.g. checking Integrations, and understanding those are now migrated) or notifications, there’s no way for the user to understand what is happening.
Because the user never made a choice in those circumstances. It was done for them, fairly quietly unless they read the release notes or happen to look in their logs at the right time and see it - if the integration even mentions it in the log in the first place. I don’t know if any or all do.
@nitobuendia, @finity Honestly, I don’t care. If you have problems with it, make a PR against the docs to make it more clear. I’m not going to debate either of you on this issue.
