Duration format meta-overview

[ichernev]

Duration format has been requested multiple times.
#1436, #1048 https://github.com/jsmreese/moment-duration-format #892 #463

The main problem is localization. Almost any hack/api can be made to work on English, but proper translation can be impossible (even cldr doesn't provide joining information -- how do you concatenate 2 hours and 5 minutes for example).

On the other hand something that just lets you format (without locale) should be fairly straight forward (check this #1048 (comment)).

The plugin listed above seems to do that, it has some weird issues and not a whole lot of stars/forks, so I'm not sure if its worth reimplementing/merging into moment. We might make it an official plugin (like timezone), because as #463 there are a lot of +1 for it.

@icambron @Oire what do you think?

[icambron]

Yeah, we should probably support something, since it's a big whole in the duration functionality. I think we should build something along the lines of what Matt and I discussed in #1048. If it's nice and small, merge it. If not, make it an official plugin. I'm hoping it can be done in the former.

[Menelion]

Well, I don't see a big problem with l10n here. If it's localizable somehow, I'll do my best to implement this for as many languages as I can (and of course, I hope, our translators will help me in doing this).

[ichernev]

cldr had a document on multi-language parsing, I can not find it right now, but it was complicated, and involves cldr data. So in the bright future when we do support cldr for translation (as plugin) we might build a (real) parsing tool around that, but not sooner than that.

If we just make it explicit that you're using the Date object, it would be much clearer what is going on. Adding a few standard formats (like ISO and rfc2822) and being able to try them all should be good for the stricter users. Not to mention the parsing flags should say whether you hit Date parser on the way.

[maggiepint]

I don't think this needs to exist along with #1048 - we really had three issues open for the same thing. Closing unless someone really wants to reopen it.