Re: overloading of internal priority calculations in agenda

[Jack Kamm <jackkamm@gmail.com>]

Hi Adam,

> I further noticed that this overloading of the internal priority by
> including timestamp and habit data causes disruption to the behaviour
> I imagine most users would expect from `org-agenda-sorting-strategy'.
> For example, if you have `priority-down' as the first entry in the
> `agenda' section and `category-keep' as the second, then differences
> in the SCHEDULED timestamp are included in the priority calculation
> and can therefore prevent sorting of two adjacent [#B] items by
> category.  This seems like a bug to me, or at least breaks the
> Principle of Least Surprise.

I just ran into this issue you highlight here.

In particular, I was trying to set the org-agenda-sorting-strategy to

(priority-down scheduled-down)

i.e., sorting by priority (highest first), and then within priority,
sorting by scheduled (most recent first).

However, the fact that the priority includes the scheduled timestamp
makes this sorting strategy impossible.

I agree this seems like a bug, in that it contradicts the written
documentation as far as I can tell (for example, the *Help* for
org-agenda-sorting-strategy mentions nothing of the fact that the
priority includes the scheduled timestamp, and I don't see anything
about it in the *Info* either).

I imagine that many have gotten used to the default behavior of sort by
highest priority, then by earliest scheduled timestamp, but we could
keep this default behavior by adding "scheduled-up" after
"priority-down" in org-agenda-sorting-strategy, as you allude.

Jack