On Sat, Dec 1, 2018 at 9:33 PM Daniele Nicolodi <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Martin,
>
> thank you for your answer. I read the threads you referring to, and I
> agree with you that having time information attached to directives
> introduces a lot of complication without much benefits. I don't have an
> usecase that requires it.
>
> What I was trying to do was to have a less surprising behavior of the
> ingest machinery. I have been surprised twice writing importers: the
> first time when using datetime classes did not raise an error but
> resulted in an invalid benacount file; the second time when I found that
> entries are sorted on a key including the line number.
>
> On 01/12/2018 18:59, Martin Blais wrote:
> > The problem with adding support for this (i.e., changing the sort order
> > rule) is that there will be a lot of other things that start relying on
> it.
> > So say, you change the schema to implicitly support date or datetime in
> > the printer, as your patch suggests.
> > Now some codes use date, some codes use datetime.
>
> The code already supports any subclass of the date class that prints as
> a date. In my importers I just use the class below (minus typos) as a
> date field, and I get the sorting I want.
>
> class datetime(datetime.datetime):
> def __str__(self):
> return '{:%Y-%m-%d}'.format(self)
>
> > Someone uses the result of some importer code that puts datetime in this
> > field - code that they didn't write, say - and passes it to some routine
> > which fails on datetime. Boom! A bug. (Note that date's don't have a
> > timezone and aren't subject to some of the timezone related issues.) Or
> > say that person does arithmetic on the dates/datetimes. And it fails.
> > That's unpredictable behavior. Then I'll get a request to fix that bug
> > on an unsupported data type and someone will be surprised it's not
> > supported officially.
>
> I understand your point of view, but there is not much you can do to
> stop people using Python language features to interact with beancount
> library functions. Other than, well, rewrite it in another language.
>
I'm planning to experiment with converting all the data structures to
protobufs and rewrite beancount.core & beancount.parser entirely in C++ at
some point if the cross-language overhead is negligible, mainly for speed.
This would enforce the schema; you wouldn't be able to set an invalid data
type on the protobuf instance.
>
> > I've agreed with others in previous threads to add
> > 1. Support for the grammar to parse a time and to insert the time
> > portion in some metadata field
>
> I agree that extending the grammar to understand a type with date and
> time information would be useful, but I don't see any advantage in
> having it as part of the directive date in the file format, if it is not
> used by beancount. Having a 'time' entry in the metadata could be
> otherwise useful.
>
Indeed, after other suggestions, it seems having a secondary sort key in
the metadata would solve the problem of sorting in the few necessary cases
yet maintain the simplicity of civil dates (without timezones).
>
> > 2. Adding an option to support specifying a secondary key for sorting
> > This wouldn't break any of the current code by default.
>
> Are you referring here to the sorting that is performed before
> processing or before serialization in the ingest framework?
>
Everywhere.
>
> In the first case, I don't know what use case it solves, thus I cannot
> comment. In the second case, I don't know what would be a good
> interface to expose it.
>
I'd just add an option so you can specify the secondary sort key name.
>
> Cheers,
> Dan
>
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