[Users] CM 3.16 and Selection when entering a folder

[Olivier Brunel]

On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 12:20:25 +0000
Paul <claws at thewildbeast.co.uk> wrote:

> On Tue, 19 Dec 2017 11:58:50 +0000
> Dave Howorth <dave at howorth.org.uk> wrote: 
> 
> > There's an ambiguity in the meaning of 'first' and 'last', in
> > particular in terms of what they apply to. In your mind you see them
> > applying to the presentation order on screen. In Paul's mind he sees
> > them as applicable to the order in which the messages arrived.
> > 
> > Short of making the description a lot longer and thereby
> > unambiguous, or changing it to be perhaps 'top' or 'earliest' and
> > thus hopefully more descriptive of the attribute it describes and
> > less descriptive of the attribute it doesn't describe, I think it's
> > something people just have to learn the meaning of. As ever,
> > writing code carries extra votes!  
> 
> Just before your message I made changes to the code in GIT.
> 
> Rather than earliest/latest I chose oldest/newest, both of which are
> better than first/last.

I believe this is wrong, because it's not what the code actually does.
First/last are better IMHO, because they're actually correct.

Just see for yourself: sort by size. Then it's not the oldest or
newest, it's the smallest/biggest! Because this is linked to the
current sort order of the list.

Have a look in the Sort menu, you'll see there's plenty of options that
aren't date, even no sort at all. For all of them, first/last are
correct, oldest/newest are not.

So now your new labels for those actions are plain wrong for every
one whose sort order isn't by date!
All of this because you're trying to do something (have it work on
messages sorted by date asc no matter what the sort order of the list)
while actually doing something else (using the sort order of the
list).

This is bound to create confusion/issues, not to mention you're not
addressing those of us who'd like to have claws use the sort order of
the list...

I still feel simply adding an option to disable this "sort order
awareness" would resolve the issue, and allow people to have it one way
or the other, as they wishes... (hence my patch.)