Re: overloading of internal priority calculations in agenda

[Adam Spiers <orgmode@adamspiers.org>]

Thanks Jack for the helpful response and support of my assessment.

I do intend to fix this as part of my ongoing (but currently delayed)
work on improving agenda sorting and adding an option to manually sort.

On Tue, 9 Mar 2021 at 07:07, Jack Kamm <jackkamm@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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