Operator feedback in the scheduler event domain

I'll try a different angle on the Distribution Bus thing…

Question:

How to you define/declare/create a Distribution Bus?

No, that's way to complicated, that's a whole bunch of different related things. Forget about bundles, unpacking, pickups, all that extra stuff… Keep it simple, just a simple sentence in words should be enough.

How do you create a distribution bus?… actually maybe its better to think:

How do you cause a distribution bus to be created?

What is a distribution bus? is it a kind of module? or something else?

Are there multiple ways to create one, or only one way?

How do you delete a distribution bus?

The point I'm trying to make is somewhat subtle. It was due to you talking about 'renaming' busses, and I thought that maybe that was a clue to why you seem to be struggling to get to grips with distribution busses. I'm maybe wrong and it's just a translation thing…

(You will know most of this, so please bear with me)

So anyway:

This is a bundle distributer… it is not a bus. This one is doing nothing because it hasn't been allocated a BUS to distribute on.

This is the same distributer, but now I've clicked on it and typed BUS_A. So now the distributer is distributing on a bus called BUS_A. (the green light means that there is at least one pickup within the scope of this distributer that is picking up from BUS_A)

This is the same distributer again. I double clicked on it and typed BUS_B. It is now distributing on BUS_B, not on BUS_A. I have not renamed BUS_A. BUS_A might still exist in a wider parent scope. Changing the text on the distributer just tells the distributer to send on a different bus.

From a usage POV, the only thing you ever know about a bus is the name. The bus IS the name, the name IS the bus. If you change the name on a distributer, you are sending on a different bus.

There are a couple of reasons I find this a better way to think about distribution busses:

#1, there is only one way to 'create' a new user bus. That is to type a name into a distributer. If a bus with that name doesn't already exist, than one is created invisibly in the background. Similarly, the only way to destroy, or remove a bus is to delete or edit the text referencing that bus name in all distributers that were sending on that bus. That being the case, if you think renaming is a thing, how would you differentiate between 'renaming' and 'creating', or 'destroying' a bus?

From that point of view, 'renaming' is an extra unnecessary detail in an abstract model that works fine already.

#2, There are two default busses that always exist, SR and CR. You don't need a distributer at all, and you can still pick them up. So for consistency of understanding, and use, between these default busses, and user busses, it's useful to think of busses in general as an invisible, background mechanism, and not something that is specifically attached to a distributer instance.

You cannot rename SR or CR (or any other bus, but these two are obvious examples). They will always be there as SR or CR. You can think of user busses in exactly the same way, and have a set of rules that align with the rules of SR and CR. That keeps everything simple.

But if your mental model involves being able to rename busses, then you need 'special' rules for SR and CR. That just adds more unnecessary complexity, and again makes the bus system more confusing for you.