Re: Inegrate Planner with Task-management app

[Alexandre Franke <alexandre franke gmail com>]

On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 9:26 AM, אנטולי קרסנר <tombackton gmail com> wrote:
> Hello Planner team,

Hey Anatoly!

> I'm writing a task-management app using Gnome desktop technologies. This
> app is planned to supply a unified model for micro-handling of tasks
> (GTD-style) and macro-management and planning, using Gantt charts,
> critical path models and so on.

Nice.

> For the second part, macro-planning, obviously Planner does much work
> already, so I'd like to integrate with it. I didn't dive into the code,
> but I saw there's a separate libplanner library giving access to data.

Indeed but note that there's no API stability guarantee for libplanner
and it's mostly meant for internal usage.

> The question is: When I look at Planner, it seems to be very simple and
> user-friendly, an attractive desktop app for effective project planning.
> But somehow, I don't hear about projects using it. Especially Gnome
> projects, which should be the first ones to do so. So I decided to check
> the development status, maybe the project was phased out and I didn't
> notice.

Planner has been designed to cater to the needs of a category of
project management methodologies which rely on WBS, Gantt, and such
concepts.

> From my experience, software developers (especially free software
developers) don't really fancy this family of methodologies. If you
have a look at one of the GNOME superstars such as the GNOME Control
Center, you'll see that its development is rigidly planned using such
tools. Should they switch to them? I'm not sure. They seem to be able
to be effective without it.

Anyway I've seen Planner (and its alternatives) used widely in big
name companies as well as in the smallest ones and I'm confident that
there's a large user base.

> The pages on Gnome Live haven't been updated for long time, and all
> commit to the git repo from the last months seem to be small bug fixes
> and minor changes.

The pages on GNOME Live don't move much because their content is still
accurate and they don't need to change. :)
Granted it's a wiki, but we use it more like a CMS and you should
consider the Planner pages as its website. However if you feel like
something's out of date there, feel free to fix it or to bring it to
our attention so that we can fix it!

The git commit activity has been rather slow lately, yet rather
steady. We don't consider ourselves dead, but we sure wish we had more
time to work on it. :P

> So I'd like to know, is Planner being actively developed? If not, why?
> Is it a technical reason or just the developers not having time for it?

I'd say the latter. Hopefully it's being fixed.

> If I decide to use Planner, I always have the option to copy code or
> concepts from it, but a much better solution is to integrate. If I
> decide to integrate and Planner isn't being active, maybe I'll even take
> some Planner development work and get new features implemented (such as
> a backend which stores data to Tracker's semantic database, allowing
> Planner and my app, and many other apps, to easily integrate through
> Tracker's data store).

The current priority is to get a more modern codebase. You know, we
still use GTK+ 2 and a lot of deprecated stuff. Features are nice but
definitely not the priority now.

> (Even in 2013 free-software and open-source projects use simple mailing
> lists, wiki and IRC, instead of moving to modern project management
> tools... which probably means that existing free software it not yet in
> the required standard. But we'll improve it)

I don't see that as a problem.

--
Alexandre Franke
Planner maintainer