Re: [Planner Dev] lag & more

[Lincoln Phipps <lincoln phipps openmutual net>]

Richard Hult wrote:

> On tis, 2004-08-31 at 07:12 +0200, Andrej Vodopivec wrote:
>
> > Richard Hult wrote:
> >
> > > On another note, I wonder if it would make more sense to actually fix
> > > the day length and related issues across the code before adding the
> > > second half of this patch. We have a mixed mess of code that hardcodes
> > > the day to 8 hours, some parts are trying to calculate it from the
> > > calendar etc. I'm not sure which way is best for handling this. MS
> > > Project has an option for day length, IIRC. Any thoughts on that?
> >
> > This is up to you. I modeled this by the code that computes the finish 
> > of a task
> > using calendar. If you think using 8 hour days is better I can fix that.
>
>
> Well, I'm interested in what people think is the best solution here...
> Should we move to a setting for the day length? This will mostly be used
> for converting time units to and from days.

Yup, you know I'd bugzilla'd this before - the 8 or
8*60*60 or similar is scattered throughout the code
i.e. the fact that 1 day is presumed to mean
8 hours , or rather 8 hours is turned back to be
displayed as "1 day".

We all know 1 calendar day is 24 hours but a working day
is "8" or a similar figure. Initially I thought it would
be easy to simply swap out the "8" for something else
but I feel we need to be careful of where we mean
by a day - is it elapsed calendar days or worked days ?. Its
thus logical to say a task takes 3 calandar days and would
be displayed as 3 days on the gantt but it requires a
bit of logic to convert that into 24 hours of worked
time i.e. 3 working days and not accidentally turn
24 hours into 1 calendar day.

So when someone is entering "days" or when we are
converting it too and from days, we need to make sure
that we logically handle both working days and elapsed/calendar
days; one is "8" or a similar numnber of hours and
the other is "24" or a similar figure of hours (*)

This ideally should be made to be a per-project setting
with a default of the current value i.e. 8 but this
could be overriden in the Project preferences.

Rgds,
Lincoln.
(*) There was my silly idea of allowing us to handle
Mars days so that people could use Planner for Mars
projects but then I looked at...,
http://pweb.jps.net/~gangale4/chronium/compare1.htm
and then slowed down on that idea. Me thinks that
NASA should stick a bunch of people into a simulated
environment for 2 or so years and then see what they
end up prefering ;)

> /Richard