Re: Repeating task hourly

[Gustavo Barros <gusbrs.2016@gmail.com>]

Hi Kyle, Hi Kevin,

On Tue, 28 Jul 2020 at 22:29, Kyle Meyer <kyle@kyleam.com> wrote:

> Kevin Liu writes:
>
>>> Is there any way to do this or are the docs out of date?
>>
>> I made a few quick changes to org-habit and it works prima facie.  Will
>> continue testing for a bit.
>
> The hourly repeater came in ec921a2a6 (Support hourly repeat cookies,
> 2012-04-20), well after the "less than 1d" guard was added in
> org-habit.el.  So, perhaps it'd make sense to update org-habit.el to
> support hour repeaters, particularly if habit users say there's a need.
>
> As a non-habit user reading through (info "(org)Tracking your habits"),
> I'm a bit worried that your patch only works superficially.  That node
> talks about "graphs that show every day" and "colors for each day"; does
> that sort of logic break down with your proposed changes?

As far as I know, indeed, org-habit provides essentially a consistency
graph, which shows in the agenda the regularity of the task for a
certain period, being the day the least (and only) unit of the graph (1
day = 1 character).

I don't think the proposed change would break anything (just a cursory
look though) but, unless I'm missing something Kevin has in mind, I
don't see how it would be of use, because an hourly repeater cannot
really be properly conveyed in the consistency graph of org-habit.  So,
as far as I understand, there is nothing wrong either in the
documentation or in org-habits.  It is just that habits tasks are a
particular kind of repeating task, and tasks that repeat in frequencies
smaller than a day cannot be properly represented in the consistency
graphs, though they work as documented in other cases.

Kevin, how do you see an hourly repeater would work with org-habit's
consistency graph?  Or, more generally, what would be the purpose of an
hourly repeated habit task?

Best,
Gustavo.