Re: [PATCH] Separate clocksum format for durations >= 1 day

[Achim Gratz <Stromeko@nexgo.de>]

Toby Cubitt writes:
> On Tue, Nov 06, 2012 at 07:42:54PM +0100, Achim Gratz wrote:
>> Nicolas Goaziou writes:
>> > Again, these are strange and very limiting rules. What if I want to have
>> > "5 h 32 min"? And "5,3 days"?
>> 
>> You provide a format string like you do now.
>
> That means if you want a format that's conditional on the duration, then
> you have to use whatever hard-coded formats are provided by the canned
> options.

Yes.  The idea is to not open that can of worms, to speak figuratively.

> Conversely, if you want to customize the format you can't make
> it conditional on the duration.

Just as it is right now.  I'm having no vested interest, but I'd
hesitate to take that option away, somebody else might rely on it.

[...]
> Including the changes in my patch, we're trying to customize three
> orthogonal things:
>
> 1. Conditioning what we display on the duration.
>
> 2. Regular vs. fractional minutes.
>
> 3. Customizing the formatting.
>
> Any combination of choices for these three factors is valid. 1 affects
> which values we compute. 2 affects how we compute one of the values. 3
> affects how we display those values.
>
> Your proposal doesn't allow 3 to be customized independently of 1 and 2.

There's nothing to stop us from looking at (and maybe modifying) the
format string and decide whether integer or fractional is requested, but
let's start simple.  The canned recipes are easily extended to include
both possibilities.

> But it seems Nicolas wants to get rid of customizable format strings
> anyway, to allow clocksum durations to be parsed back into a number of
> minutes (see other part of this thread).

I can see how this would help some things, but then you'd surely need to
clamp down on customization for good and just offer a selection from
which to chose or require that a user-supplied format string meets
certain criteria or be accompanied with a parser that undoes the
formatting.  But that gets ugly fast and doesn't help much with legacy
documents…

> For this, a single defcustom for choosing pre-canned formats with no
> user-defined functions and no customizable format strings is the only
> (sane) option. In which case this discussion is somewhat moot.

Indeed.  But let's wait for Nicolas.


Regards,
Achim.
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