-
Bug
-
Resolution: Fixed
-
Low
-
None
"This Tuesday" appears to be incorrectly identified as "Last Tuesday". See attached screenshot.
Today is Friday 2013-Aug-02. As of now and according to my understanding of relative dates, "last Tuesday" was the Tuesday before this week's Tuesday, i.e. 2013-Jul-23. JIRA seems to be identifying 2013-Jul-30 as "last Tuesday", which I would normally call "this Tuesday" because it is the Tuesday that falls in the current week.
I find relative date identifiers in JIRA to be inconvenient because they make me look at a calendar or wait for hover text to find out the specific date something happened on, when it should be an effortless thing. Dates are intrinsic to what JIRA does - the management of work over time - and they need to be unambiguous and easy to interpret.
I just took a straw poll of three adjacent Atlassians. Two of us thought "last Tuesday" was 2013-Jul-23 and two of us thought it was 2013-Jul-30.
I think it is a good idea to remove relative date identifiers entirely and use specific dates instead.
- mentioned in
-
Page Loading...
[JRACLOUD-66457] Relative date identifier incorrect in an issue's Activity tab
Looking at how JIRA translate 'lastWeek' and 'nextWeek', I think it's an easy change to just change:
nextWeek: relativize ? AJS.I18n.getText("common.date.relative.days.next", "[", "]", "L") : "LLL",
lastWeek: relativize ? AJS.I18n.getText("common.date.relative.days.last", "[", "]", "L") : "LLL",
sameElse: "LLL"
to
nextWeek: "LLL",
lastWeek: "LLL",
sameElse: "LLL"
So, any days before 'yesterday' or after 'tomorrow' will be printed using the good old date format.
It seems to be a bug in the open source library used by JIRA:
https://github.com/timrwood/moment/issues/573
Unfortunately, that ticket is closed without a fix (So I guess it's a "Won't Fix").
I think they miss the concepts of "past in the same week" and "future in the same week".
This is also bothering me.
When you view an issue that has been updated recently, you expect to see the correct dates instead of a term that's even ambiguous between native speakers.
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/3841/which-day-does-next-tuesday-refer-to
This can be an issue for people speaking English as a second language and might not be aware of the ambiguity.
Also there is a ripple effect on internationalisation as translators may interpret these terms incorrectly and thus translate them incorrectly.
We should really try to avoid using ambiguous terms (and subtle terms which are often hard to translate).
Where would I change this at?