Re: [PATCH] Separate clocksum format for durations >= 1 day

[Nicolas Goaziou <n.goaziou@gmail.com>]

Hello,

Toby Cubitt <tsc25@cantab.net> writes:

> Looking through the code, it seems the clocksum format options are used
> in two places: org-colview.el and org-clock.el. For some reason, only the
> latter honours `org-time-clocksum-use-fractional'. In my patch, only the
> former honoured the new `org-time-clocksum-days-format'. Some
> rationalisation of all these options is clearly needed.

That's the purpose of the patch: only one function to rule them all.

> Most users are probably happy with the defaults. So the question is how
> best to allow the small minority who want to tweak the clocksum format to
> do so.

Allow a free function and provide default ones.

> A couple of questions:
>
> 1. Is there any real need to allow the org-colview and org-clock formats
>    to be customized independently? Making them the same would simplify
>    things and probably be clearer for users.

I think they should be formatted the same way. It's important to have
a consistent format for such things.

> 2. What are the different formats that users are likely to want? The list
>    can't be very long. I can think of: "hh:mm", "hh.mm" (fractional),
>    "dd hh:mm" (separate days), "dd hh.mm", and possibly "MM dd hh:mm" and
>    "YY MM dd hh:mm".

Just provide what is actually possible to have along with your day
count. It will make a good enough default offer.

> If the above covers everything we want, then what about getting rid of
> every customization option except `org-time-clocksum-format', and parsing
> the format string itself to decide how many and what arguments to pass to
> it?
>
> More precisely, if the format string contains ":", "." or "," then the
> smallest time component is minutes; otherwise it's hours. Pass as many
> time components as necessary to fill all the "%" expandos in the format
> string, from largest to smallest, with either hours or minutes as the
> smallest. If the format string contains "." or "," then pass the number
> of minutes as a fraction ("," is used as the decimal separator in many
> European languages).

That would be over-engineering it.

> This would simplify things, and make the format string just "do the right
> thing" in all the cases I listed above. On the other hand, it won't allow
> unusual formats that don't fit the above scheme (but they're not possible
> now, anyway).
>
> Thoughts?

I think it's too much complicated: it requires to know about strange
formatting rules. I suggest to keep it simple: just specify a function
with fixed arguments to do the job and provide default functions to
handle most common cases.


Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Goaziou