Hi guys, Bug #416778 got me thinking about the kind of data that we are currently storing in .planner files. This bug is about the work and cost of a task in exported HTML that is calculated incorrectly if the working day does not have 8 hours. The reason that this bug exists is that we require the exporter to calculate these things based on the info in the .planner file. The kind of data that I would expect to find in the .planner file is the minimum amount of information that is required to recalculate the same schedule and nothing more. On the other hand I would not expect an exporter to do any complicated calculations on the schedule (and duplicate algorithms in libplanner). Which leads me to conclude that exporters should not use the .planner file as input. It would be better to have an intermediate data format that planner provides to the exporters. This intermediate format should contain anything that an exporter could ever need to represent a schedule. The current .planner file format should then be stripped of any information that planner itself doesn't need. Advantages: - exporters would be simpler - the intermediate format can be changed between planner versions without bothering users with incompatibility issues - .planner files would be smaller Disadvantages: - It would be more difficult to create exporters external to planner, because they would not get the information they got before. - if scheduling algorithms in planner became so complex that they took a long time to execute, regenerating the entire schedule when a file is loaded might not be an option anymore. We might be forced to re-introduce some generated data into the .planner file. What do you think? Regards, Maurice. -- Maurice van der Pot Gentoo Linux Developer griffon26 gentoo org http://www.gentoo.org Gnome Planner Developer griffon26 kfk4ever com http://live.gnome.org/Planner
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