proposal 185

This is a fix for Issue 185.

The current duration(string) function accepts a floating point value with a s suffix indicating a duration in seconds which is at parity with what the protobuf utilities support for parsing google.protobuf.Duration values from strings; however, this format is incredibly difficult to use in practice.

A more human-readable format like the one supported by golang time.ParseDuration would vastly improve the usability of duration(string), so we propose to update the spec to include ns, us, ms, s, m, h durations with a mix of duration intervals in the same literal.

The golang time.ParseDuration method supports an easy to read duration string as input:

Examples:
    0
    1h2m3.4s
    +2.999999999us
    -24h

Grammar:
   duration: sign? (0 | (leading_digit digit* ('.' digit+)? unit)+)
   sign: ('+' | '-')
   leading_digit: 1..9
   digit: 0 | leading_digit
   unit: ('ns' | 'us' | 'ms' | 's' | 'm' | 'h')

This functionality is also available in the abseil.io C++ libraries as time::ParseDuration.

Go and C++ support inf as an input, but as the input is not a valid google.protobuf.Duration value, infinite duration values should not be accepted in CEL. Likewise, the valid duration range will be limited to the duration values which can be supported by the google.protobuf.Duration

Duration units are neither required to appear in order, e.g. 2m1h is valid, nor required to be non-overlapping / non-repeating. The spec is flexible in these regards as they are better left as best practices.