Essentially, I guess we need to have some logic like:

sub x_units_ago {
    my ($x, $units) = @_;
    given($units) {
        when ('hours') { ln('{x} hours ago', ...) }
        when ('days') { ln('{x} days ago', ...) }
        when ('months') { ln('{x} months ago', ...) }
    }    
}

Right?

Yes, that should work.

Ok, this is the kind of thing that the lexicon stuff does. If we end up doing this alot (ourselves), we'll basically be re-inventing it I wonder what the best way to proceed is.

Found the article about the lexicon stuff, it's http://search.cpan.org/~jhi/perl-5.8.1/lib/Locale/Maketext/TPJ13.pod.

We could use Time::Duration's 'ago': https://metacpan.org/module/Time::Duration#ago-seconds- and then add the appropriate ln() calls in a dummy function somewhere. Since we're using a precision of one, we just need:

{x} year/day/hour/minute/second(s) ago

Which is five strings. This isn't Locale::Maketext's use case; if we were using Time::Duration's default of two unit-types precision we'd run into the complicated multiple-pluralizations-in-the-same-string problem, which is where Maketext starts making more sense (FSVO "more sense" – Maketext is needlessly complicated IMO, and I really doubt we need it).

Feel free to investigate whatever line seems most appropriate - you folks are doing a better job at understanding i18n than I

http://codereview.musicbrainz.org/r/2318/