On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 08:33:37AM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Yes, "75 months" is unacceptable. I suspect people's mind would not work
> well with anything larger than 60 months. I've actually thought about
> "don't care about months" point, but 12 months is a long time. You
> certainly remember there still was a noticeable maturity difference
> between classmates who were born in the earliest months of the school year
> and in the last months before graduating grade school. Perhaps after 20
> years.
I'm not sure human and code development necessarily follow the same
timelines. Git wouldn't even be in kindergarten yet. ;)
> > Another option would to give higher resolution in number of years, like
> > "3.5 years" or even "3.1 years".
>
> But I do not think people think of years in terms of decimal fraction.
I think decimal fraction is overkill. Halves or quarters are more
reasonable.
But after sleeping on it, I think "Y years, M months" is not that bad.
So here is a patch (Eugene, note that this conflicts with your "fall
back to DATE_SHORT" patch).
-- >8 --
Subject: [PATCH] never fallback relative times to absolute
Previously, for dates older than 12 months we fell back to
just giving the absolute time. This can be a bit jarring
when reading a list of times. Instead, let's switch to "Y
years, M months" for five years, and then just "Y years"
after that.
No particular reason on the 5 year cutoff except that it
seemed reasonable to me.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx>
---
Please feel free to mark the 5 years up to 20, or whatever
you think is appropriate.
I think this should produce good output in all cases. There
are a surprising number of corner cases, and I spent an
embarrassing amount of time looking at the output of "git
log --pretty=tformat:'%ai / %ar'".
You could also argue for splitting this into "support N
years, M months" and then still fall back to absolute time
eventually (whether DATE_SHORT or not).
date.c | 20 +++++++++++++++++++-
1 files changed, 19 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
diff --git a/date.c b/date.c
index d75dff4..1165d30 100644
--- a/date.c
+++ b/date.c
@@ -133,7 +133,25 @@ const char *show_date(unsigned long time, int tz, enum date_mode mode)
snprintf(timebuf, sizeof(timebuf), "%lu months ago", (diff + 15) / 30);
return timebuf;
}
- /* Else fall back on absolute format.. */
+ /* Give years and months for 5 years or so */
+ if (diff < 1825) {
+ unsigned long years = (diff + 183) / 365;
+ unsigned long months = (diff % 365 + 15) / 30;
+ int n;
+ n = snprintf(timebuf, sizeof(timebuf), "%lu year%s",
+ years, (years > 1 ? "s" : ""));
+ if (months)
+ snprintf(timebuf + n, sizeof(timebuf) - n,
+ ", %lu month%s ago",
+ months, (months > 1 ? "s" : ""));
+ else
+ snprintf(timebuf + n, sizeof(timebuf) - n,
+ " ago");
+ return timebuf;
+ }
+ /* Otherwise, just years. Centuries is probably overkill. */
+ snprintf(timebuf, sizeof(timebuf), "%lu years ago", (diff + 183) / 365);
+ return timebuf;
}
if (mode == DATE_LOCAL)
--
1.6.2.rc1.269.ga7d41
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