"past month/year" shows calendar/month year rather than period

[Brian Murray]

The main errors.ubuntu.com problem page says "Most common problems in the past" [day|month|year]. However, as I understand if you were to filter on month you'd really be presented with reports for 6/2012 not 5/2012 which was the past month. So insead I think the text should say in "Most common problems in this" [day|month|year].

[Evan (ev)]

Brian and Matthew,

Do you think developers would rather have the past 30 days, the month they're currently in, or the month gone past?

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Per 1033813, I feel strongly that having the past 30-day interval is most important. Getting a consistent report that covers a fixed length of time is crucial; and you want the data to be as recent as possible - on Aug 31 you don't want to see the data for the month of July, which won't reflect any of the SRUs for the past 30 days.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

I agree with Steve regarding the past 30 days - specific months aren't interesting in this case.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

I have never come across "the past month" being used to mean a calendar month, rather than the past month up to today. (And a quick Googling confirms that Americans use the latter meaning, too.) A calendar month would be "last month", not "the past month". And as you've pointed out, calendar months just aren't interesting here.

If people did misinterpret it that way, though, then "Most common problems in this month" would be even worse, because the phrase "this month" *is* commonly used to refer to the calendar month.

[Evan (ev)]

Okay, 30 days past it is.

[Evan (ev)]

I made the relatively small and straightforward change for this last night, but have not committed it. The query for 30 days was taking upwards of 2 minutes through my (admittedly slow) ssh tunnel to one of the Cassandra nodes. I suspect this is because of the way the DayBucketsCount column family is currently modelled. I'm investigating how we can speed this up in bug 1047268.