Bug 30298

Created attachment 38901 [details] [review]
proposed fix

The implemented approach is still the same:
1. Request messages for additional date (+/- 1 day depending on time zone) if
time zone offset is not zero.
2. Pass to the UI only messages from the selected local date (remove extra
messages).

Hi Vitaly,

Your patch doesn't work correctly for me. With it, if I have a test log on say, December 5 at 22.45, and I'm on GMT+1, it's shown on December 6, though it (correctly) says "December 5, 23.45". It should be shown on December 5th though.

Created attachment 41456 [details] [review]
updated patch

That was my mistake, sorry, fixed.
There was a similar issue in the _tpl_log_manager_get_dates, which is also fixed using the implemented approach.

Review of attachment 41456 [details] [review]:

datetime.c has been removed from 0.2.X branch. We strongly encourage using GDateTime instead. I don't know if this bug is still present in newer version, it it's still present, we need a new patch.

Well looking into this problem again I found that the log file mentioned in the description seems invalid (or obsolete) - the file name is wrong. Telepathy would save the log as 20100518.log despite of the fact, that the timestamp of the message is "20100517T23:45:00". So the file name is dependent on timezone, which is bad.

Therefore I suggest to fix this issue in the following way:
1. Make log file names independent from timezome.
2. Apply the approach implemented by the patch above to fix the wrong date in Empathy's log viewer.

Please let me know your opinion and then I'll update the patch.

Btw thanks for replying back.

(In reply to comment #6)
> Well looking into this problem again I found that the log file mentioned in the
> description seems invalid (or obsolete) - the file name is wrong. Telepathy
> would save the log as 20100518.log despite of the fact, that the timestamp of
> the message is "20100517T23:45:00". So the file name is dependent on timezone,
> which is bad.

I have not made my mind yet on this. I think the original author had in mind that the user will remember a message to be on a certain day (his local timezone day). But for ordering reason, and because authors of Logger travel a lot, it was decided that messages timestamps would me marked as UTC to avoid potential miss-ordering. It's possible that this is a mistake and that we should have also stored the message timezone, which would have given Empathy a maximum of tools to show it the right way.

I think all this is based on the fact that we would like to group the text messages base on conversation. But that concept of conversation start/stop does not really exist, you may start it in the morning, disconnect, come back, reply to your body (but he was off-line), then the next day he saw the message and replied.

I think anytime we focus on 1 message, we need direct before and after context to understand, not really a day division.

> 
> Therefore I suggest to fix this issue in the following way:
> 1. Make log file names independent from timezome.
> 2. Apply the approach implemented by the patch above to fix the wrong date in
> Empathy's log viewer.
> 
> Please let me know your opinion and then I'll update the patch.

I think I need to speak with Emilio (who is currently implementing the Log Viewer redesign, see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=619866). Also, feel free to jump in the discussion, Emilio is pochu on IRC and I'm stormer, usually hanging on gimp.net #empathy and freenode #telepathy.

With crafted notion of conversation in the log viewer this is no longer a concern.