Having hardcoded attributes (like colours) for assets makes maintenance hard for downstream forks

[benparsons]

Your use case

Problem

We have users who maintain forks downstream of element-android. Sometimes they want to edit assets to match their own branding. Maintaining such a fork is hard when there are hard-coded attributes in assets.

Example

This value was changed: https://github.com/vector-im/element-android/blob/78bdef4e2d3f2eec67b67f93637052ee25881b3e/vector/src/main/res/drawable/ic_shield_trusted_no_border.xml#L8
By this PR: #4338

This small change created significant work downstream, because it wasn't clear what had changed

Suggestion

Could these attribute values be stored centrally?

Have you considered any alternatives?

No response

Additional context

Internal issue ref: https://element-io.atlassian.net/browse/PSC-46

[bmarty]

We can use the accent color for vector drawables, however in this particular case (the green shield), I'm not sure it is relevant.
Supposed that a fork want to change the accent color to red. The green shield will become a red shield and this is not what we are expecting.
What we can do is extract this specific color #0DBD8B to one or several variables (for instance trust_shield_color which can have the value #0DBD8B by default) so that they can be customized more easily on forks.

[bmarty]

Fixed in 1.4.6