The viewer's "x years ago" info sucks ;-)

[Johannes Zarl-Zierl]

Am Mittwoch, 12. April 2023, 13:27:11 CEST schrieb Tobias Leupold:
> Am Mittwoch, 12. April 2023, 06:22:07 CEST schrieb Per Funke:
> > "1.83 y/m/d ago" is unconventional but attractive
> > IMHO,
> > Per Funke
> 
> Hmmm ... I think this would be too unconventional, especially facing the
> fact that a year is not divided into decimal units (it's 12 months after
> all, not 10).

Maybe it's just me, but using decimal representation for time units does not 
seem so odd. "1.83 years ago" is easy to read and understand, even if one does 
not intuitively realize that it is the same as "1 year, 9 months, 28 days, 19 
hours 20 minutes ago".
Plus: it eliminates the need to come up with a universal way to shorten this 
(should it be 1 year, 10 months, or 1 year, 9months, almost 29 days?).

Would a hybrid approach work better in your opinion? I.e. "1 year, 9.96 
months". This does arguably combine the best and worst of both approaches:

- ugly to compute (depends on the length of the month)
- decimal point in non-decimal unit (e.g. "4.6 months")
+ canonical representation (always "X years, Y months", no complicated 
heuristic needed)
+ more intuitive than pure decimal notation ("1 year 9.96 months ago" vs "1.83 
years ago")


> Any objections if I implement this in a way I would expect it to be (both
> for birthdays/ages and timespans) soonish and you all have a look at it
> then?

Sure - I'll gladly take a look at that work branch and comment on it ;-)

Cheers,
  Johannes