[6.0][project_long_term] useability field: bad name + useless?

[Raphaël Valyi - http://www.akretion.com]

Hello,

in the project_long_term module, in the project.resource.allocation object, there is a field called "useability".
There are several issues with it:

1) misspelling: it should be "usability" rather than "useability"

2) a simple grep shows it's never used anywhere in any module, not even in the phase/tasks scheduling wizards.

3) what is that "useability" parameter meant for?

From the spec here https://bugs.launchpad.net/openobject-addons/+bug/499400 , it seems it should be like some sort of occupation load rate that would impact the effective duration of a project. For instance, if a phase number of days is 10 but 'useability' is 50%, then the effective duration (start date to end date) should be 10 working days: from the spec:
"Set an onchange on tasks, when you select the duration, it computes the date_end, according to the date_start, duration, and project.timesheet.group and useability."

However, this sounds like it would be redundant with the 'efficiency' factor of the resource.resource object that is being allocated, no?
Was that meant to be the 'efficiency' factor from Project Faces http://faces.homeip.net/doc/node46.html ? (it's not mapped as a "faces efficiency" in the scheduler however).
What would also be the reason to name it 'useability' in this case?

Please beware that in English, 'usability' doesn't mean anything like "taux d'utilisation" in French is that the mistake you did.

In one of our project, we actually need the notion of number of days really used by the resource within a phase: for instance if the phase duration is 10 days but you need the electrician only 8 days (and you need other resources as well), then you need that kind of parameter for every resource (for costing and operational organization), but in any case we would call it differently then.

Finally, it's also not very clear if the phase "duration" field is a load or a duration. I really prefer it to be a duration, but in this case, it's strange to read in the spec:
""Set an onchange on tasks, when you select the duration, it computes the date_end, according to the date_start, duration, and project.timesheet.group and useability."" (that would mean duration would better be called load then).
I don't really like the notion of load at the phase level as you might need resources of different kinds to complete a phase, so you couldn't determine the phase effective duration from those heterogeneous resource efficiencies (unless you specify the phase load at the resource level, was that the purpose of that "useability" factor, is that actually a load factor? Then why isn't named something like load_rate?).

So, could you please or remove or rename more appropriately that 'useability' field before people start to use it in wrong and inconsistent ways in extension modules?
Could you clarify how this is supposed to work?

[Samantha (samantha-z-mathews)]

i completely agrre with Raphael.

for international prods, english has to be precise n clear.
I m from portugal. my eng is nah so gud though;)

[Samantha (samantha-z-mathews)]

no one listens yet?

[Nicolas Vanhoren (OpenERP) (niv-openerp)]

This was a WIP functionality that was changed since.

[Fabien (Open ERP) (fp-tinyerp)]

Nicolas, can you update the bug ? If it's done mark it as done, if not, check what we have to do ?
Thanks,

[tfr (Openerp) (tfr)]

There is no more field usability, there is only one field availability