Re: Feature request for shorter relative date format in log

[Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>]

On Wed, Aug 02, 2023 at 03:31:51PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> writes:
>
> > But we don't have a way for users to provide custom over relative dates.
>
> Are there existing systems to format time durations in a customized
> way, just like strftime() is a way way to custom-format a timestamp,
> that we can just use, or write our own modelling after them?

I'm not aware of such a utility, no. I had imagined that we would
represent the duration between two timestamps as another timestamp
offset that same amount after the Epoch. Then the caller could specify a
strftime format string and format the "duration" that way.

> The relative-time code decides which points in the time durection
> spectrum are good places to switch the granularity (e.g. up to 90
> seconds we will give "N seconds", and up to 90 minutes we will give
> "N minutes").  You could grep in date.c:show_date_relative() for
> Q_() and _(), and place them in an array and allow them to be
> replaced by strings in the configuration variable, but that will
> cover only one smaller half of the problem (i.e. how the "N seconds"
> are shown) and the other half (i.e. what variants there are, and
> which variant is used for what time duration---you cannot introduce
> a rule that says "up to 500 seconds, show 'N minutes M seconds'").
>
> Even with that solution to the smaller half will also create i18n
> headaches.

Yeah, I think mangling with those translation identifiers is going to be
a giant mess.

> No, I am not interested in working on such a solution myself.  But
> it will be an interesting puzzle.

Ditto ;-).

Thanks,
Taylor