Re: [Planner Dev] planner bugs

[Richard Hult <richard imendio com>]

On tor, 2004-04-15 at 16:14 +0200, Robert Hoedicke wrote:
> Hi,

Hi!

> - The bracket spanning the subtasks of a task would not render
>   if it was completely spanning a page, it would only show up
>   on pages that contained either the beginning or the end of
>   the bracket.
> 
> - It would be nice if the grey vertical bars in the printout
>   corresponded to holidays, and were not just arbirary.

Both of those bugs are fixed in CVS, and will be in the coming version.

> Both mrproject and planner 0.11 have a severe problem, they apparently
> can not handle dependencies between subtasks that belong to different
> tasks. The Gant chart looks good at first, but when you save the plan
> and look at it again in a new session, dependency arrows run backward in
> time.

Yeah, this is a known bug. I have a fix for it that needs a bit more
work.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=136044

> It is unfortunate that the tool does not provide an interface for reordering
> resources. In mrproject it was possible to achive that by editing the
> XML file, this aparently does no longer work in planner 0.11. When opening
> an mrproject file in planner 0.11, the order of resources was reversed.

You should be able to reorder them in the xml file still, even if the
order has been reversed between 0.10 and 0.11. It might be a good idea
to fix that reversion even if it'll break files from 0.11. I guess most
people are using 0.9 and 0.10, so it might be the best way.

> A very severe shortcoming is that both tools apparently do not handle
> (not even detect) overbooking of resources. Detecting overbooking is
> one of the main reasons for using such a tool in the first place.

There are bugs that discuss this:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129436
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=139443

The new resource usage view that will appear in the next version might
help here.

> Oh, and there was the occasional crash due to a segmentation violation.

Specifics here would be great, otherwise we can't fix anything. Such as
what were you doing when it crashed, preferably a stack trace, etc.

> Our admins complained of the huge list of things planner depends on.
> Do you really need things as ugly as Perl to build it?

Really, perl must be the most commonly installed software you could
find ;)

As for runtime dependencies, yes, all are needed. If we didn't use
already-written code, we would have to write those thousands of lines
ourselves, which would take time and introduce more bugs, etc etc.

> These problems will unfortunately prevent us from using planner on our
> project, we might even be forced to use some MS-tool (eek), but I hope
> that my comments may help you in improving planner.

Thanks for you input, it'll help. It would be great if you could add
comments to the existing bugs mentioned, if you have further input. And
please feel free to submit new bugs for those that aren't already filed.

Finally, we accept patches of course, and Imendio also does contracting
work on Planner if you should be interested in that.

Regards,
Richard

-- 
Imendio HB, http://www.imendio.com/