On Tue, 4 Mar 2025 at 16:29, Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org> wrote:
> Another small complaint: I don't like this style of relative times. (I
> have also complained about it for the buildfarm status in the past.) I
> suppose both styles are useful like 50% of the time, but I'll tell you
> some of my reasoning:
So it's currently using Django its default "timesince" function. I
think we can probably modify that a bit to fit better with the
commitfest purpose.
> 1) It is often more useful to eyeball whether a patch was last updated
> in 2025-01-XX or 2025-02-XX or 2025-03-XX. It doesn't really matter how
> many days or weeks that was, it matters more where in the commitfest
> cadence the update happened.
I'm not entirely sure what your intent here is. Do you actually just
want to know the month part, then Dec, Jan, Feb could work.
Or are you using the month part as a proxy for knowing how many
commitfests ago the last update was. If so, what would be good
descriptions then? And when would the cutoff from relative times be
for these more coarse descriptions? e.g. use "ago" if something is
less than a month ago. And then go for commitfests, instead of months.
So 1 commitfest ago, 2 commitfests ago etc.
> 2) Similarly, for recently updated entries it is more useful to see
> whether something was updated this week or last week. "3 days ago"
> could be earlier this week, or last week, or just before the weekend, so
> effectively 1 day ago. This is sometimes useful, and the relative
> specification hides that.
How about simply using the names of the week days instead of n days
ago. So on a Wednesday each previous day would be called the
following:
- yesterday
- last Monday
- last Saturday
- last Sunday
- last Friday
- last Thursday
- 1 week ago
> 3) The mental overhead of analyzing something like "3 months, 3 weeks
> ago", which is non-decimal, negative, and does not consistently align
> vertically, is just a lot.
Yeah, I agree with this. Two levels of precision is a bit excessive.
Although I'm not sure that the alignment problem actually applies
because this column is right-aligned.
I'll make sure to remove that.
