493397 - Activity manager should coalesce events somehow

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[David Ascher (:davida)]

Lots of standard behaviors (deleting a bunch of mail one at a time), gloda syncing autosynced or moves messages) currently result in the activity manager showing huge long lists of essentially duplicate messages.  I think we need to somehow get those things coalesced, so that 100 successive deletion operations are displayed as "100 messages deleted", and so that periodic operations either get summarized ("since we started, 12341 messages indexed") or archived.

The con:
 - coalescing means it becomes impossible to reach in and do something to one of the events in the coalition, such as an eventual undo.  "Luckily", our undo story is weak enough that I think we can not bother for TB3.

I'm not sure how to implement this, so cc'ing some of the people who've written activity manager clients, as well as bryan for his take on this.

Unfortunately, it feels like this is a blocking-tb3, as the dialog will quickly become useless as things stand.

Some UX goals, IMO:

 - things like "<account> is up to date" should delete any older reference to the same account, so that we only show the _latest_ time a given account was up to date.  This might be doable by tweaking the API to the activity manager, to include an optional "override older things that are just like this" argument.

 - moves to trash shouldn't show up at all, but be expressed as 'deletes' (an issue for the move/copy/delete client code)  (this isn't tied in to this bug, but required for the thing below to make sense)

 - user-triggered actions should be grouped by folder, as long as they're contiguous in the activity manager history.  So that if I do 
    - delete 1 message from inbox
    - delete 1 message from inbox
    - delete 1 message from inbox
    - delete 1 message from inbox
then i switch to todo
    - delete 1 message from ToDo
then back to inbox
    - delete 1 message from inbox
    - delete 1 message from inbox

that should show up as:

    - deleted 4 message from inbox (most recent)
    - delete 1 message from ToDo
    - deleted 2 messages from inbox

I suspect that this kind of grouping will have to be done by the client, unfortunately.

Thoughts?

Comment 1

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #0)

>  - user-triggered actions should be grouped by folder, as long as they're
> contiguous in the activity manager history.  So that if I do 
>     - delete 1 message from inbox
>     - delete 1 message from inbox
>     - delete 1 message from inbox
>     - delete 1 message from inbox
> then i switch to todo
>     - delete 1 message from ToDo
> then back to inbox
>     - delete 1 message from inbox
>     - delete 1 message from inbox
> 
> that should show up as:
> 
>     - deleted 4 message from inbox (most recent)
>     - delete 1 message from ToDo
>     - deleted 2 messages from inbox
> 
> I suspect that this kind of grouping will have to be done by the client,
> unfortunately.
> 
> Thoughts?

Can we add the new beahvious without removing the old one. Make this bug the new default bahavior and have a pref to switch to the current behavior - as this might be a great way to get information for bug repports.

Comment 2

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Agreed that this needs to block.  Since Activity Manager is one of our shiny new features for Tb3, shipping without this fixed would feel very half-assed.

Comment 3

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Not sure whether this bug should actually belong to Standard8, but he's the right person to figure that out.

Comment 4

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I've split the user-triggered actions out into bug 499265.

(In reply to comment #1)
> Can we add the new beahvious without removing the old one. Make this bug the
> new default bahavior and have a pref to switch to the current behavior - as
> this might be a great way to get information for bug repports.

Given a pref would mean a restart, I'd propose something like adding a log option such that the order of activities would be preserved.

Comment 5

[David Ascher (:davida)]

IMO, all activity manager client code should also be using log4moz, which has built-in pref handling for dumping to console or stderr.  I don't think we want extra logging logic just for activity manager stuff, which is really just UI.

Comment 6

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

The Thunderbird drivers wish to release Thunderbird 3 as soon as possible. As a
result, we feel that this bug shouldn't stand in the way of all the other good
work getting into the hands of users sooner rather than later. Therefore we are
retargeting it for 3.1. See http://ccgi.standard8.plus.com/blog/archives/242
for more details. The 3.1 release is expected to be a quick release soon after
Thunderbird 3.

Comment 7

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Getting this for 3.1 would be great, but given its focus on being a soft landing pad for Tb2 users at major update time, I don't think we'd hold if it were the last bug standing.  blocking- and wanted+ set.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I'm unsure how desirable this would be. It might look cleaner. But AM would have less detail which might be problematic for someone trying to retrace their actions

Comment 9

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Agreed, though I think we do this to some extent already(?). That the activities aren't necessarily in the correct order makes the AM way less useful than it could be, and I'd prefer more of a log view with exact timestamps. Coalescing would also be problematic for cancelling individual activities if we ever get that implemented.