Re: "ago" times on buildfarm status page

Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> writes:

> On Wed, Aug 21, 2019 at 9:40 AM Peter Eisentraut <
> peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> I find the time displays like
>>
>> 01:03 ago
>>
>> on the buildfarm status page unhelpful.
>>
>> First, I can never tell whether this is hours-minutes or minutes-seconds
>> -- there is probably a less ambiguous format available.
>>
>> But more importantly, the page doesn't say when it was generated, so a
>> relative time like this is meaningless. The page might have most
>> recently reloaded last night. That means when I look at the page, I
>> *always* have to reload it first to make sense of the times.
>>
>> I notice that the page source actually includes absolute times that are
>> then converted to relative using some JavaScript. Could we perhaps just
>> turn that off? Or preferably convert to local time. I can much easier
>> make sense of an absolute local time: I can compare that to the clock in
>> the corner of the screen, and I can compare that, say, to a commit
>> timestamp.
>>
>
> It used to be that the "ago" part was generated on the server, but Andrew
> changed that to the fixed timestamp + javascript to improve cachability and
> thus performance. Perhaps now that it's that it could be as easy as adding
> a checkbox to the page (which could remember your preference in a cookie)
> that switches between the two modes?

The Javscript could also be made to update the "ago" part every minute,
and show the absoulte time as a tooltip, which is what pretty much every
other website does.

- ilmari
--
"A disappointingly low fraction of the human race is,
at any given time, on fire." - Stig Sandbeck Mathisen