Re: Collaborating with TODO lists and clocks.

[Samuel Loury <konubinix@gmail.com>]

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Hi,
Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu> writes:

> Hi Gareth,
>
> Gareth Smith <gds@doc.ic.ac.uk> writes:
>
>> I hadn't thought of using :tags on a clock table. I still worry if we'll
>> find ourselves in a situation where more than one of us has clocked in
>> some time on the same task.
>
> Yes, I agree this might not be optimal, for that case in particular.
> One nice thing about this use of tags is that you have a representation
> of when more than one person is working on a task, but that makes the
> clock less useful, as it can no longer represent an individual's working
> time without some effort to separate the clocks of the different owners.
I recently encountered the issues of having to collaborate with other
persons on the same task (all of us would need at some point to clock
into this task).

I thought that changing the value of the variable org-clock-string could
help, but I have not tried it yet. Let me explain why it could help:

It is for the time being set to "CLOCK:", but imagine that the user A
set it to "CLOCK-A:" and the user B set it to "CLOCK-B:" (in their
respective .emacs files), then after some time a clocked task would then
look like:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
* Do something
  CLOCK-A: [2013-09-05 Thu 07:55]--[2013-09-05 Thu 08:46] =>  0:51
  CLOCK-A: [2013-09-04 Wed 09:05]--[2013-09-04 Wed 09:41] =>  0:36
  CLOCK-B: [2013-09-04 Wed 08:00]--[2013-09-04 Wed 09:03] =>  1:03
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Then the agenda for each user would report only the time spent by
himself.

The time spent by each participant is clearly separated.

There are some problems with doing so:
- I don't know yet how to configure a report showing the time spent by
every body,
- I am not sure the clock time sum would work.
- grepping for "CLOCK:" on org sources shows:
  --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
  ./lisp/org-clock.el:782: 	(while (re-search-forward "CLOCK: \\(\\[.*?\\]\\)$" nil t)
  ./lisp/org.el:851: (defcustom org-clock-string "CLOCK:"
  ./lisp/org.el:8501: 	      (while (re-search-forward "^[ \t]*CLOCK:.*$" nil t)
  ./lisp/org.el:15007: (defconst org-clock-drawer-start-re "^[ \t]*:CLOCK:[ \t]*$"
  ./lisp/org.el:15578:     (while (looking-at "^[ \t]*\\(:CLOCK:\\|:LOGBOOK:\\|CLOCK:\\|:END:\\)")
  ./lisp/org.el:15579:       (if (member (match-string 1) '("CLOCK:" ":END:"))
  ./lisp/org.el:17278:     (looking-at "^[ \t]*CLOCK:")))
  --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
  Those look like "hard coded" "CLOCK:" instead of using
  org-clock-string. They would need to be fixed.

What do you think of this solution? Has anyone already use a solution
like this?

Best,

PS: I have tried changing the org-clock-into-drawer variable to be
"CLOCK-A" and "CLOCK-B" so that the task would then look like 
--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
* Do something
  :CLOCK-A:
  CLOCK: [2013-09-05 Thu 07:55]--[2013-09-05 Thu 08:46] =>  0:51
  CLOCK: [2013-09-04 Wed 09:05]--[2013-09-04 Wed 09:41] =>  0:36
  :END:
  :CLOCK-B:
  CLOCK: [2013-09-04 Wed 08:00]--[2013-09-04 Wed 09:03] =>  1:03
  :END:
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
But it needs org-drawers to contain the values for each collaborators
for it to work (and then should be maintained) and the folding mechanism
did not seem to work for those special drawers.

-- 
Konubinix
GPG Key    : 7439106A
Fingerprint: 5993 BE7A DA65 E2D9 06CE  5C36 75D2 3CED 7439 106A

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