Re: Bug: Recurring items NEVER show up in timeline unaccompanied

[Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>]

Mark S <throaway@yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
> Lisp tends to bring out my inner dyslexic,  but is it possible to use
> a "while" or other construct instead of "mapcar" and then make the
> "if" construction inside of the lambda check for the :omitted symbol
> and return it as nil? And it would need to break out of the loop as
> soon as it encountered a date equal or greater to the present.
> 
> Philosophically, the way I think the calendar should work for
> recurring events is that they only occur until the last event in the
> calendar UNLESS an argument has been given to specify how far out the
> calendar is to be drawn OR there is a global end-date / end-range
> variable.
> 
 
The bug is indeed easy to fix. What's harder is to figure out how things
*should* work as you point out:

o where should it start? should the timeline include past dates by
  default? when the user says so? should it *ever* include past dates?

o where should it stop? The last explicit entry is one possibility,
  user-input is another (but this would require changes to the user
  interface), a time limit specified by the user in some configuration
  variable is a third.

The more one looks at these things, the more one marvels at the choices
that Carsten and Bastien and Nicolas and the Babel developers (and on and
on) have made: getting things so that they work *just* right most of the
time and providing enough flexibility to cover most of the remaining
cases is hard work.

Nick