Support passing depth to naturaltime, timesince and timeuntil filters

[Giannis Terzopoulos]

I propose extending these filters to accept an optional depth argument that gets passed downstream:

• timesince would pass depth to django.utils.timesince.timesince()
• timeuntil would pass depth to django.utils.timesince.timeuntil()
• naturaltime would pass depth to NaturalTimeFormatter.string_for(), which would then pass it to the underlying timesince/timeuntil calls

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Example:
For a datetime object dt representing 38 days in the past:

{{ dt|naturaltime:"1" }} would return "1 month ago", instead of the current depth=2 output: "1 month, 1 week ago"

[Sarah Boyce]

Since the depth parameter was added to timesince and timeuntil within #31623, I believe this is a logical follow up

[blighj]

This is less simple than it appears at first.
The timesince and timeuntil filters can already take an optional argument, a variable containing the date to use as the comparison point. Since filters can only take one optional argument there is no room for depth. I've thought about overloading it, but I've concluded it's a bad thing to do.

If people need this functionality in their projects, I think it is okay that they can create their own simple_tag for the job.

The naturaltime filter does not have any arguments, you could add it there, but the justification Sarah used about timesince and timeuntil functions being updated is a little more of a stretch if it is only this filter from humanize that is being updated.

I'd suggest this should be changed to wontfix.

[Ben Cardy]

Having read the above, I still see value in adding support to the naturaltime filter. It may not be currently possible to expose this to the timesince and timeuntil filters, but I think it's a good flexibility to add to naturaltime as we can.

I've assigned the ticket to myself (as it's been a while since it was last worked on), and written a small PoC PR for this: ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/22258

Equally, if the consensus is to close the ticket as not worth adding, that's fine.