Thanks @Grant,
Problems with decimals are:
- they misleadingly suggest a much bigger precision than is really in the data
- display in forms (as @Schuchert 's screen shots show)
- more importantly, display on labels: the values have become three or four times as long, so they will not fit anymore
- data delivery to GBIF, ALA etc.
On the other hand, there seems to be no benefit in having the values changed to decimals at all, as Specify removing “spurious zeros” already indicates that we are not working at the kind of precisions where the additional precision that decimals provide makes a difference (I do not know when that kicks in, but I expect you’ll need more than ten decimal places for that).
The bigger problem though is that a very significant change was made without consultation with users and ostensibly without thinking. You might be able to engineer solutions for the Specify clients, but some of us have Specify integrated with other systems and I think that is something the SCC would want to encourage rather than derail. We make our own labels and reports and use the IPT for delivery of data, so we do not use the Specify clients for that. Yes, I can fix everything that this change will break, but I should not have to. And what if a collection hired a contractor to develop some tool around Specify some years ago and are not able to fix things?
Also, rather than engineer patches for things that have broken, why not tackle the problem at the source and just roll back the change?