branch last-modified field should format times better

[Martin Pool]

In eg <http://code.launchpad.net/~jelmer/> branches are listed with their last modified date, which is almost (modulo bugs?) the date of the last commit.

Bug 306080 is part of this: showing "72 weeks ago" is not very meaningful; also showing "1 hour 13 minutes" is too precise.

The relative times are actually a bit hard to read, since you can't just scan down the column looking at the numbers, you need to also read the (possibly multiple) words.

Showing the relative date emphasizes how long ago the item was changed. In some cases, if this is an action list that's overdue, that may be useful. However, if we're trying to show someone generally interested in Launchpad that there's interesting content, we don't want to emphasize this.

On the Launchpad bugs homepage (eg http://launchpad.net/bzr) you get relative times for things in the last day, and then the absolute date in ISO form. This seems to work pretty well because it's difficult to give an absolute hours-and-minutes time that's guaranteed to be correct across timezones.

Alternatively we could do what evolution does and show "1:20pm today", "3pm Wednesday", "2009-01-12".

Orthogonally, we could fold the time into the 'last commit' column, which would give more space for the more interesting content. It would still be possible to sort by using the dropdown on this page.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

If the TAL template for formatting is used somewhere else, we could consider those cases too.