Re: [Gramps-devel] data loss - please check

[Doug B. <dou...@gm...>]

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 8:32 AM, Duncan Lithgow <dun...@gm...>wrote:

> Hold on guys, fun as this line of thought is the problem is that
> GRAMPS does accept '0000' as a year, so we use it for unknown parts of
> a date. Try for example 'from 1976 to 0000' - it works fine. So the
> issue is do we always accept '0' as a valid date entry or do we make a
> new way of entering unknown parts of dates.
>

I believe the issue is that year 0 has a special meaning in GRAMPS (meaning:
this is an empty date). It just happens to do something when you have the
second date as year 0. In my opinion, all uses of year 0 should give an
error. You should use the well-defined "before 1968" which has support in
GEDCOM and extra support in GRAMPS. For example, you can do some nice
estimates of date differences. For example, GRAMPS can compute an
approximate age of someone born "before 1838" and who died "after 1867".
Your attempt to hack the dates breaks this, and other things.

-Doug



>
> Duncan
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