bug#40137: 25.1; ERC ignore function should allow specifying a limited duration

bug#40137: 25.1; ERC ignore function should allow specifying a limited duration

[Phil Hagelberg]

When using ERC, sometimes you need to /ignore users who are annoying
you. Rather than having all ignores persist until you manually un-ignore
them, it would be useful to be able to specify an amount of time after
which the ignore would expire on its own.

(bandali on the #emacs channel requested that I file this as a bug)

bug#40137: documentation for application developers?

[Thovthe via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors]

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Hi Bruno,

Have you looked at the packaging documentation in section 6.1 and
6.2?  I just packaged QDirStat and all I had to do was
write/modify a package definition for it then build that with
`guix build`.  If you're looking for more synchronous help you
could join the IRC or matrix rooms.

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bug#40137: 25.1; ERC ignore function should allow specifying a limited duration

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Phil Hagelberg <phil@hagelb.org> writes:

> When using ERC, sometimes you need to /ignore users who are annoying
> you. Rather than having all ignores persist until you manually un-ignore
> them, it would be useful to be able to specify an amount of time after
> which the ignore would expire on its own.

The timeout itself doesn't seem like it'd be too difficult to implement,
but I'm not quite sure whether this would actually be useful.  What's
the use-case?  I mean, if a user is annoying, then the user will still
be annoying forever?  Hm...

Anyway, if this were to be implemented, in what format would the timeout
be queried for?  Perhaps hours?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no

bug#40137: 25.1; ERC ignore function should allow specifying a limited duration

[Amin Bandali]

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Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Phil Hagelberg <phil@hagelb.org> writes:
>
>> When using ERC, sometimes you need to /ignore users who are annoying
>> you. Rather than having all ignores persist until you manually un-ignore
>> them, it would be useful to be able to specify an amount of time after
>> which the ignore would expire on its own.
>
> The timeout itself doesn't seem like it'd be too difficult to implement,
> but I'm not quite sure whether this would actually be useful.  What's
> the use-case?  I mean, if a user is annoying, then the user will still
> be annoying forever?  Hm...
>

I'd personally use this feature if it were available.  Some people are
not /always/ annoying, just /sometimes/. :-)

>
> Anyway, if this were to be implemented, in what format would the
> timeout be queried for?  Perhaps hours?

Irssi seems to use seconds [0].  But I think minutes would be a nice
compromise between seconds and hours.  Though, ideally, we'd be able to
parse relative time strings like "+1h", "+3d", "+2w", and so on.

[0]: <https://irssi.org/documentation/help/ignore/>

Do you know if Emacs has functions for parsing such time formats outside
Org?  This seems like one of many situations they would come in handy.

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bug#40137: 25.1; ERC ignore function should allow specifying a limited duration

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Amin Bandali <bandali@gnu.org> writes:

>> Anyway, if this were to be implemented, in what format would the
>> timeout be queried for?  Perhaps hours?
>
> Irssi seems to use seconds [0].  But I think minutes would be a nice
> compromise between seconds and hours.  Though, ideally, we'd be able to
> parse relative time strings like "+1h", "+3d", "+2w", and so on.
>
> [0]: <https://irssi.org/documentation/help/ignore/>
>
> Do you know if Emacs has functions for parsing such time formats outside
> Org?  This seems like one of many situations they would come in handy.

Yeah, that would be handy...  I think.  Or perhaps not -- asking people
to learn a new "language" to just set a timeout is perhaps not ideal...

Anyway, I think hours would make sense -- it's a human-scale unit.  If
people want a quarter hour, they can just say 0.15.  Inputting seconds
sounds kinda ... excessively precise. 

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no

bug#40137: 25.1; ERC ignore function should allow specifying a limited duration

[Amin Bandali]

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Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Amin Bandali <bandali@gnu.org> writes:
>
>>> Anyway, if this were to be implemented, in what format would the
>>> timeout be queried for?  Perhaps hours?
>>
>> Irssi seems to use seconds [0].  But I think minutes would be a nice
>> compromise between seconds and hours.  Though, ideally, we'd be able to
>> parse relative time strings like "+1h", "+3d", "+2w", and so on.
>>
>> [0]: <https://irssi.org/documentation/help/ignore/>
>>
>> Do you know if Emacs has functions for parsing such time formats outside
>> Org?  This seems like one of many situations they would come in handy.
>
> Yeah, that would be handy...  I think.  Or perhaps not -- asking people
> to learn a new "language" to just set a timeout is perhaps not ideal...
>

Would it really be that big of a burden?  I'd imagine 10m, 2h, ...  to
be familiar/intuitive enough for most users, especially those with an
Org background.  Further, to alleviate this, we would set a default unit
for when none is provided (e.g. take 10 to mean 10m).

>
> Anyway, I think hours would make sense -- it's a human-scale unit.  If
> people want a quarter hour, they can just say 0.15.  Inputting seconds
> sounds kinda ... excessively precise. 

Agreed on seconds being excessive, but I would probably prefer minutes
over hours.

Anyhow, if anyone knows functions for parsing relative dates/times, I'd
appreciate it if you could point them out to me.

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bug#40137: 25.1; ERC ignore function should allow specifying a limited duration

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Amin Bandali <bandali@gnu.org> writes:

> Anyhow, if anyone knows functions for parsing relative dates/times, I'd
> appreciate it if you could point them out to me.

Looks like org-element-timestamp-parser is the org time parser...
probably a bit excessive.  :-)

We'd want to parse stuff like 1m3d, right?  Which is awfully like what
iso8601-parse-duration accepts:

(iso8601-parse-duration "P3Y6M4DT12H30M5S")
=> (5 30 12 4 6 3 nil -1 nil)

(iso8601-parse-duration "P3W")
=> (nil nil nil 21 nil nil nil -1 nil)

So just upcase and add a P to the start and we're there.  :-)

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no

bug#40137: 25.1; ERC ignore function should allow specifying a limited duration

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> So just upcase and add a P to the start and we're there.  :-)

It was a bit more work, and time specs are ambiguous (1m means a month
or a minute?), but I've now implemented this.

The ambiguousness means that this could probably be tweaked a bit, but I
made the prompting thing into its own function, and we can more it to a
more central location if something else wants to use it.  And then tweak
further, if necessary.  For instance, one may do a DWIM check on the
string:  1m4m clearly means 1 month and four minutes and 2d4m means two
days and four minutes, while 1y1m is terminally ambiguous.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no