Relative timestamps are not precise enough for release managers

Bug #94393 reported by Tollef Fog Heen
24
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Launchpad itself
Triaged
High
Unassigned

Bug Description

A little while ago, launchpad switched from proper timestamps (2007-03-20 20:05) to age-based timestamps (21 hours ago). At the same time (I believe) the precision of timestamps in bug comments in malone was reduced from at least minute precision to day precision.

Please revert this change, it's making my job as a release manager a lot harder since I now have to do maths to determine if a package made it onto a CD image (for instance).

Tags: lp-bugs
Revision history for this message
Francis J. Lacoste (flacoste) wrote :

There is no need to do math, the exact timestamp is still available as title attribute on the date. So it should appear in a popup if you over the mouse over the age (or date when more than one day old).

I agree that this isn't very discoverable.

Revision history for this message
Tollef Fog Heen (tfheen) wrote : Re: [Bug 94393] Re: timestamps are confusing on beta.lp.net

* "Francis J. Lacoste"

| There is no need to do math, the exact timestamp is still available as
| title attribute on the date. So it should appear in a popup if you over
| the mouse over the age (or date when more than one day old).

Aiee.

While this is certainly better than not having it available anywhere
(and it means I can fix up the page myself using greasemonkey), having
it easily visible would be good; one point is I want to see times and
dates at a glance rather than having to point, wait for two seconds
for the popup to pop, repeat for next version, etc.

--
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are

Changed in launchpad:
importance: Undecided → High
status: Unconfirmed → Confirmed
Changed in malone:
status: Confirmed → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote : Re: timestamps are confusing on beta.lp.net

Regardless of whether this *should* be fixed, it's not fixed at the moment. Exact dates and times are shown (without mouseover) for old timestamps, but not for recent ones.

Changed in malone:
status: Fix Released → Confirmed
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Jonas Jørgensen (jonasj) wrote : Re: Relative timestamps are confusing

Also, relative timestamps mean that if you print a page (or maybe take a screenshot, or look at a page that was loaded a couple of days ago and is still open), you don't know what time the comment was added.

Why not show both, in the situations where only the relative time is showed now? As in: "Foo wrote on 2000-06-11 (1 second ago)" (or the other way around)?

summary: - Relative timestamps are confusing
+ Relative timestamps are not precise enough for release managers
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