[taskjuggler-devel] Feature requests triggered by bztotj.py

From: Tom Schutter (tom_at_platte.com)
Date: Wed Mar 29 2006 - 02:46:50 CEST 

From: Tom Schutter <tom@platte.com>
Message-ID: <1a37.4429d8fa@www.taskjuggler.org>
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2006 02:46:50 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: [taskjuggler-devel] Feature requests triggered by bztotj.py

I have just submitted a script "bztotj.py" to the "TaskJuggler Usage" forum. This script extracts tasks from a Bugzilla database and creates TaskJuggler tasks.

The following is a list of feature requests that would allow bztotj.py to generate better output, and to make it easier to write similar scripts in the future.

Allow quoting of quotes in strings. Currently a task name cannot have both single quotes and double quotes, such as:

Finish reading Melville's "Moby Dick"

I would propose this syntax:

task read_moby_dick "Finish reading Melville's \"Moby Dick\"" { }

Allow global search for task IDs. When generating tasks from Bugzilla, I know that the task names are unique, because they take the form of "bug_10932". When trying to create references to other tasks, bztotj.pl has complex code that figures out how to traverse the task tree. That results in references like this:

task bug_10 "10" {
  task bug_11 "11"
}
task bug_12 "12" {
  depends !bug_10.bug_11
}
task bug_13 "13" {
  task bug_14 {
    depends !!bug_10.bug_11
  }
}

Knowing that my task IDs are unique, it would be nice to be able to have TaskJuggler search the whole tree to find references. I would propose that using "*" at the beginning of a reference task ID, like this:

task bug_10 "10" {
  task bug_11 "11"
}
task bug_12 "12" {
  depends *bug_11
}
task bug_13 "13" {
  task bug_14 {
    depends *bug_11
  }
}

This would also make hand-edits of the file easier, because you would not need to fix links when you move tasks up and down the tree.

Currently, bztotj.py cannot write resource definitions, because the user may need to add other info to the resource such as vacation. This could be a problem if there are may resources in the Bugzilla database. The ability to define a resource in one place, and then add information to it in another would be helpful. No syntax suggestion for this one.

Projects created with bztotj.py are more dynamic in their start date. Allowing a "TODAY" date and date "offsets" would make project maintainence easier. I also submitted a script date_macros.py which generates macros that refer to dates 1, 2, 3 months in the future. For example, I would like to define a project like this:

project example "Example" "1.0" 2005-05-01 (TODAY + 12 months) { }

Some other syntax would be just as acceptable.

Thanks 

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