Comments on latest changes

[Jef Driesen]

On 2012-08-18 18:45, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> I think the mistake we did was to call them "Trips".
>
> They really aren't. They are "Dive groupings" (think along the lines
> of "very approximate possible nitrogen loading groups"), but they are
> dive groupings where the header makes it hopefully very easy to then
> associate them with dive trips and dates.
>
> I don't think we should necessarily move subsurface to explicitly
> track trip information, although if somebody really wants to and
> writes the code, I guess I'm not going to complain violently. It's
> just not something I'd personally work on or worry about, and I 
> really
> think that it might be better to just instead make it explicit that
> it's not so much about "Trips" (after all, the dives could all be
> local in your back yard pond) as it is about a simple date-based
> grouping/clustering to make it easier to see what's been going on.

I think automatically organizing dives into trips is a bad idea. It 
might be convenient if you are diving mainly on holidays, but it will be 
really annoying if you are diving locally on a regular base. For 
example, I do the majority of my dives at local dive sites, and I dive 
there quite regularly. Thus, with the heuristics of starting a new trip 
with an surface interval less than x days, I would end up with many mini 
trips, while the logbook should contain no trips at all.

However, I do think grouping is a very nice feature if it would be 
implemented in a more generic way. I see it more as a companion to 
sorting the view, rather than have the grouping hardcoded in the xml 
data format. A good analogy to describe what I have in mind is a mail 
client. A mailbox (logbook) is simply a flat list with emails (dives). 
When you sort by date (or subject, etc), you can optionally group the 
results (e.g. typically in categories like today, yesterday, last week, 
last month, etc).

The important concept here is that, the grouping is just a 
presentational thing in the user interface and not limited to only 
date/time based grouping. You can equally well group on any other dive 
attribute (e.g. dive site, max depth, etc), just like you can sort on 
them. If the xml format is extended to include some kind of trip 
attribute, then you can easily group by that too, but now without the 
need for any heuristics. Of course we can keep the heuristic for 
(optionally) automatically assigning trip attributes to new dives, but 
that's not the point I wanted to make.

Jef