bzr info shows me times in unuseful timezones

[Steve Alexander]

I have a colleague who lives in New Zealand. I did bzr info on one of his branches, to see if he'd updated it recently. As part of the output, I got this:

Branch history:
      4345 revisions
      1093 days old
   first revision: Tue 2004-06-22 05:34:14 +0000
  latest revision: Tue 2007-06-19 21:32:29 +1200

Bazaar is showing me the latest revision time in my colleague's local timezone. That's not useful to me. I don't care what time of day it was for him when he committed that revision. I care when it was in UTC, or when it was in my own local timezone.

So, I think this information should be presented either in UTC or in the timezone of the person running the 'bzr info' command.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

bzr log has an --timezone option to control this: you can ask for times to be displayed in either the local (Steve), original (NZ) or gmt timezone. That option should be available on bzr info too. We normally show times in the time they originated and I think info should remain consistent with that by default.

Maybe we should also show "4 hours ago" next to the time, rather than just "1093 days old".

[Steve Alexander (stevea)]

Martin said "we normally show times in the time they originated". Why?

I'd think a more useful policy would be "we normally show times in the timezone of the user requesting the information". This is better for two reasons.

1. The information is more familiar to the user requesting the information
2. It avoids the problem of two pieces of comparable information (like the time of two consecutive commits) being presented in different timezones, and thus harder to understand.

The only downside of this is when the user requesting the information wants to know what time of day it was locally to the committer. Why would I care whether a New Zealander is making a commit in the morning or at night?

So, I propose that the UI guideline for bazaar be "We normally show times in the timezone of the user requesting the information."

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

On Thu, 2007-06-21 at 08:48 +0000, Steve Alexander wrote:
> Martin said "we normally show times in the time they originated". Why?
>
> I'd think a more useful policy would be "we normally show times in the
> timezone of the user requesting the information". This is better for
> two reasons.
>
> 1. The information is more familiar to the user requesting the information
> 2. It avoids the problem of two pieces of comparable information (like the time of two consecutive commits) being presented in different timezones, and thus harder to understand.
>
> The only downside of this is when the user requesting the information
> wants to know what time of day it was locally to the committer. Why
> would I care whether a New Zealander is making a commit in the morning
> or at night?
>
> So, I propose that the UI guideline for bazaar be "We normally show
> times in the timezone of the user requesting the information."

This makes sense to me; evolution does the same thing.

Anyone object to this conceptual change - if not we should document the
policy in HACKING, and do a quick check for places to fix and file bugs
related to that.

-Rob
--
GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.

[John A Meinel (jameinel)]

Seems fine to me. I don't really know why someone cares enough about hours to make a big difference, but using all local timezones is reasonable.
(I think the people who care enough about what *hour* something was committed are about as likely to care both with or without timezones. Was Jelmer working on this last night? How late was he working?)

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

On 6/21/07, Robert Collins <email address hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-06-21 at 08:48 +0000, Steve Alexander wrote:
> > Martin said "we normally show times in the time they originated". Why?
> >
> > I'd think a more useful policy would be "we normally show times in the
> > timezone of the user requesting the information". This is better for
> > two reasons.
> >
> > 1. The information is more familiar to the user requesting the information
> > 2. It avoids the problem of two pieces of comparable information (like the time of two consecutive commits) being presented in different timezones, and thus harder to understand.
> >
> > The only downside of this is when the user requesting the information
> > wants to know what time of day it was locally to the committer. Why
> > would I care whether a New Zealander is making a commit in the morning
> > or at night?
> >
> > So, I propose that the UI guideline for bazaar be "We normally show
> > times in the timezone of the user requesting the information."
>
> This makes sense to me; evolution does the same thing.
>
> Anyone object to this conceptual change - if not we should document the
> policy in HACKING, and do a quick check for places to fix and file bugs
> related to that.

No objection to changing that policy, though I don't see it as a super
high priority. I would kind of like if the code changes can factor
out this general concept of displaying in a timezone that's controlled
by --timezone so it's consistent across log, info and whatever.

--
Martin

[AstroFloyd (astrofloyd)]

Alternatively, it would be great to have an option in ~/.bazaar to set your preference (original/local/utc).

Somewhat (un)related, the reason why I'm interested in this is that I'm thinking about switching from svn to bzr, converting existing repositories. However bzr svn-import sets the original timezone to utc, which is a bit confusing even (or especially) if all collaborators are in the same timezone. This would be automatically fixed when I could store my preference. In the mean time, this also means that the timezone is stored somewhere in the .bzr directory of each repository. Could you tell me where, so that I can see whether I can change this after conversion?

Thanks for what seems to be a great VCS!