feature request: multi-valued buddies list

[Jef Driesen]

On 09-03-13 16:47, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Mar 9, 2013 5:28 AM, "Guillaume Rousse" <guillomovitch at gmail.com> wrote:
> .
>>
>> Just to clarify: you actually create a pseudo-buddy foreach possible
> combination, just to keep current UI simple ?
>
> No. Just list your buddies with commas in between, our whatever. So you can
> write "Dirk, Linus and some guy whose name I didn't catch". Done.
>
> Have you even tried it? It's simple. No pseudo-buddies, no games, no
> complexity. Just list your buddies. Write them out.
>
> The list of people you dive with often will auto-complete, others you'll
> just write out. Why would you want anything more complicated? That would
> just be bothersome and inconvenient.
>
> Your buddies can look any way you want. People you know well might be just
> the first name. New people you meet on a dive trip and will never met again
> you can write the name and more for if you want to.
>
> More structure would nee just silly and limiting.

I guess this depends on how you intend to use the buddy field. Right now it's 
just a simple text field, and it's not really used for anything, other than 
displaying and storing it.

But this changes as soon as you want to actually process this information. For 
example calculating statistics (e.g. how many dives have you done with each 
buddy), or searching (e.g. show only dives with a particular buddy). Personally 
I think this is what makes an electronic logbook more interesting than a paper 
one. A very nice example is macdive's smart divelog feature, which let's you 
define custom queries on your data and save them as a smart filter:

http://www.mac-dive.com/images/features/feature_smart.png

But this is very difficult to do correctly without more structure. Imagine you 
have two buddies: "Dirk Hohndel" and "Dirk". With a free-form text field, 
searching for "Dirk" will also find "Dirk Hohndel". With a more formal buddy 
definition, dives can refer to those (with a buddy id or something like that) 
and there is no ambiguity. It will also make it easier to have some UI to list 
your buddies independently from your dives.

Jef