improving the file mtime in gtkfilechooserdefault.c

[zentara <zentara zentara net>]

Hi,
I'm a Perl hacker, more than a c person, but I've
been finding that I need to dig into the Gtk+ c libs
to really understand what is going on.

Anyways, a question came up in a newsgroup today
about the inadequacy of the mtime printout in the
filechooserdialog.  You know, it has "Today, Yesterday,
and a y/m/d date string, without hours, minutes, and seconds. 

I thought about what level of accuracy I would like to see as default,
in my set of libs, and I had to agree with the poster.

So I started digging around in the 
gtkfilechooserdefault.c
file from the Gtk+-2.8.11 sources. The section which sets
it up, has a line 
##############################################################
        else
            format = "%x"; /* Any other date */

          if (g_date_strftime (buf, sizeof (buf), format, &mtime) == 0)
            strcpy (buf, _("Unknown"));
        }
###########################################################

The first thing I did, was try to change the %x to a %c ( and a few other
formats), but I always ended up with 00:00 for the hour and minute.
It appeared that I could not get hour, minutes, and seconds out of
the g_date_*  set of functions.

So I went back to just using the plain strftime function, and it seems to
work ok.   Here is my modified list_mtime_data_func

#######################################################################
/* Tree column data callback for the file list; fetches the mtime of a file */
static void
list_mtime_data_func (GtkTreeViewColumn *tree_column,
                      GtkCellRenderer   *cell,
                      GtkTreeModel      *tree_model,
                      GtkTreeIter       *iter,
                      gpointer           data)
{
  GtkFileChooserDefault *impl;
  const GtkFileInfo *info;
  GtkFileTime time_mtime;
  char buf[216];
  struct tm *cal_time;
  gboolean sensitive = TRUE;

  impl = data;
  info = get_list_file_info (impl, iter);

  if (!info)
    {
      g_object_set (cell,
                    "text", "",
                    "sensitive", TRUE,
                    NULL);
      return;
    }

  time_mtime = gtk_file_info_get_modification_time (info);

  if (time_mtime == 0)
    strcpy (buf, _("Unknown"));
  else
    {
        cal_time = localtime(&time_mtime);
        char *format;
/*      format = "%y/%m/%d(%a) %H:%M";   Any other date */
        format = "%F %T";

/*     if (g_date_strftime(buf, sizeof (buf), format, &mtime) == 0) 
            strcpy (buf, _("Unknown")); 
*/
       strftime(buf, sizeof buf, format , cal_time);
  }
###################################################################

So what I'm looking for is comments on whether:

1.  will  I be breaking something by this change

2.  is there a way to get the hours, minutes and seconds to display
    using the g_date_strftime set of functions

3.  I think this may be a useful configure option, especially if a choice
     of format string, could be put in the gtkrc style for the filechooserdialog,
     like in gtkrc have a line 
      format = "%y/%m/%d(%a) %H:%M";

      or if that is too involved, maybe a configure option to use the full time string,
      or the current "user-friendly" design.


Like I said, a far better Perl hacker, than c hacker, so I'm looking for
any improvements.

zentara


-- 
I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
http://zentara.net/japh.html