Re: TaskJuggler 3, revisited

[Anthony Lander <anthonylander@yahoo.com>]

Hi John,

On 10-Oct-8, at 9:24 PM, John Hendy wrote:

> I'm coming up on some serious need for a project manager. I really  
> only need gantt chart creation at this point. I strongly dislike the  
> Qt interface and the need to use that if one wants to get a gantt  
> chart output from the process. I would much prefer being able to  
> design my html charts, print them as PDFs or take screenshots and  
> embed them in presentations, send them to others, etc. (as per tj3).

I am roughly in the same boat as you are. I installed tj2 because the  
tk3 manual says it is still unstable, but it's not an ideal solution  
for me, as I have everything running on a mac, with tj2 running in an  
ubuntu virtual machine (because of the Qt requirement).

..and in addition, I found that the exporter for tj2 - which does 90%  
of what I need - was none the less missing a couple of features, so I  
started adding them. Specifically I fixed:

	- The project node was confused with the top task node.
	  I changed it so that the project gets its own node. Needed because...
	- The project now respects an end date or a duration specified on the  
project node
	- I made the TODO state export as a flag so that you can use it to  
filter reports
	  (eg generate a pending tasks or an in-progress tasks report)
	- There was no way to easily add reports or other globals, besides  
customizing
	  variables, so I added a globals and reports node.
	- There was no way to handle taskjuggler features that the exporter  
doesn't know
	  about, like scenarios. I fixed this by making a :TJ: drawer, into  
which you can
	  dump any taskjuggler code you like (on any node), so that even if  
the exporter
	  doesn't support a feature you want, you can still make it work from  
org-mode.

I've only just got this working, and I haven't written a single line  
of documentation for it, except for code comments.

> - is there any progress on an exporter for tj3?

My original thought was to post my changes here as a patch, to be  
tested and hacked on by the group. Maybe it would be smarter to just  
change it into a taskjuggler3 exporter? I just looked through "moving  
from 2 to 3" section of the taskjuggler manual. On first glance, it  
looks like the semantic changes won't bother the exporter, and that  
the syntactic changes are relatively minor. So I am willing to give it  
a whirl.

Given the foregoing, two questions for the group:

1. Is anyone interested in the changes I've made for tj2? I  
unfortunately don't have time to document them, except in point form  
as above, but I am happy to put together a patch and send it to the  
list for others to bang away on.
2. Carsten, would you be interested in these changes, and/or a  
taskjuggler3 exporter?

Thanks,

   -Anthony