List of projects that can be packaged for new developers

[berryma4]

We need a list of projects that can be packaged for new developers. I will assign this issue to different people for modification.

• create javafx widgets for BOY
• make the pvmanager file datasource more feature complete

[shroffk]

• new Graphene plots
• contributing BOY test cases and screens

[kasemir]

Update time (range) handling:
org.csstudio.apputil.time currently offers routines for formatting and parsing time stamps as both absolute ("2007/06/01 14:00:24.156959772") and relative time ("-2 Months +5 years"), which is mostly used for time ranges ("-2 weeks" until "now") in the Data Browser, alarm msg history.
I believe other plugins (logbook viewer?) introduced similar code for specifying times

• Consolidate that with org.epics.util.time.Timestamp and TimeInterval
• Fix the relative time handling (based on TimeInterval?) so that "-2 Month" really means 2 month ago, not just 2*30 days ago, no matter if we are dealing with 28-day-February or 31-day January.
• Use that wherever time stamps/ranges are parsed: Logbook viewer, data browser, ...

[gcarcassi]

org.epics.util.time.Timestamp and TimeInterval are not calendar based: they are time-based. Once Java 8 is out, they correspond to java.time.Instant and java.time.Duration. Java 8 will provide java.time.Period, which is what Kay is describing.

I do not think it makes any sense, at this point, to create common classes for calendar based time (like Period) in epics-util: they are hard to make and we'll have to ditch them later in favor of standard classes. If one wants to start right away, there is a backport for JSR 310:
http://threeten.github.io/
It's not 100% compatible, but it exists, it's very similar to Java 8.

Providing standard widgets to work with java.time.Period would be useful. Though JavaFX may provide them at some point.

[kasemir]

Yes, "Update time (range) handling" should consider the upcoming Java 8 support.
However it is eventually implemented, I've started to list the requirements in #153 so that this issue can remain as the top-level list of possible projects, and details for this one are then found in #153

[berryma4]

this was more of a discussion .. closing