Hi everybody,
seems like it is about time I wrote my first entry.
I am using German GrampsAIO 6.0.3. As soon as I select the Datumsart (date type) ‘Von’ (‘From’) it autocompletes to ‘Ab’ in the comment entry. See below.
To me, this is a little confusing.
Is that a new bug? A known bug? Or no bug at all?
Thanks for your support!
Regards
Sellwicher
If you enter a “Zweites Datum”, does the ab change to a von ____ bis ____ data phrase?
From what Perplexity.ai just explained to me, ab is the open-ended form of a date range phrase. von implies a fixed date span should be expected.
Gramps 5.2 recently added “From” and “To” date type phrases with a single date.
Early Operator Comparison development discussions implied that these would be for “open ended” date ranges. But the final 5.2 features were not implemented that way. Instead, the new “From” and “To” were made analogous to the “After” and “Before” date types that are qualified by intervals specified in the Preferences.
In effect, this means there is no way to manage a full range of dated Place Names.
You can kludge an override of the interval for a “To” with a fixed beginning date in pre-history. But exceeding the “From” interval is impossible. (e.g., the British Colonies in America became the United States of America in 1776. “From 1776” or “After 1776” is interpreted as “from 1776 to 1776+50”. Nor can you use “from 1776 to today” because the parser immediately converts the “today” to today’s date. And future dates cause validation errors.)
Intervals are probably ok for Person names because the timespan intervals in Preferences tend to cover normal human lifespan reqirements. But Place names may need to be in timespans covering epochs.
Thanks, I haven’t tried that yet, but found something interesting in the German documentation at:
Pretty much at the bottom of the page, there is a list of the Datumsarten (data types):
A little further down on the same page there is another list of Datumsarten:
‘Von’ seems to have become ‘Ab’.
Is it possible that the drop down box follows the first list, whereas autofill follows the second one?
In the English version of that page, both lists seem to be identical:
Thanks again!
This change was made by the German translators on Weblate.
I remember adding “ab” to the German date parser in commit acae238. The parser will now accept either “ab” or “von”.
True. But I read the question as about why the parser re-writes dates entered as von 1995 to ab 1995
(Similar to it re-writing the more compact English c. 1995 to about 1995. But not exactly the same because that doesn’t have 2 different preferred forms based on the date content.)
The German date displayer now uses “ab” rather than “von”. This was a decision made by the translators. See the Weblate comments for from/ab.
So the Parser is actually storing the initial von as the English From in the tree data? And then string translator is converting it on-the-fly to the current display language … which uses ab in this case?
So the von disappeared from awareness early in the process.
That seems to be the case, which is a little confusing when you enter one thing and get a display that is a synonyme. Similarly confusing as the two different list basically showing the same.
No, that was a misunderstanding.
At least now I know it is not a bug but works as designed and is part of let’s call it Gramp’s individuality.
Thanks a ton!
Nice, saying “Gramp’s individuality”. My point is that this individuality is not in line with the definitions in the GEDCOM standard. So it is impossible to exchange dates as a core element in genealogy with other genealogical programs without loss of information in some cases. The syntax is exchangeable now but not the semantics.
I understand that implicit time intervals defined by the user have a long history in Gramps, but this concept is a bit exotic.
BTW: in the first screenshot there is a selection box labeled „Dual datiert“; I know the meaning but the translation is not acceptable.
