Re: [Planner] Planner and 5 year projects

["lincoln phipps openmutual net" <lincoln phipps openmutual net>]

jan polcher wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am wondering if Planner can be used for 5 year projects with about 750
> tasks to manage. 

Sounds interesting. The main issue in spanning 1 year is this bug
I reported,

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=136940

Thats really in the presentation - its stored correctly,
just displayed confusingly. I think if the year is different
we need to display the year (or make it a display option i.e.
a Planner options check box of... Display Year ? [YES/NO]

> I could have tried it myself but I am stuck for the moment with
> compilation on a RH7.3 box. But I have played around with mrproject.

Planner is not a fork from MrProject but a rename. MrProject
was a name that was related to the older company and Planner
is for the new company. I have no idea as to why.

MrProject code is dead and out of date. The most recent
Planner 0.12 version just out also gets rid of a number of
old bugs that were in MrProject.

Trouble is the minimum dependancies in various packages
means you'll need some stuff tweaked. The actual RH
kernel won't matter but other GNOME stuff'll have to be
upgraded.

> My main problem is that I have cases where one or more of the
> predecessors is one or two years back. mrproject would not allow me to
> specify more than 100 days !

This shouldn't be too hard to adjust if that constraint is still
in place. Its probably some sanity check or a field which has a
field width set. All duration fields are stored in seconds
internally in Planner and can take the name of the period when
it parses the time with only one field, lag, that I know doesn't
used the task_tree_parse_time_string () and presumes what the
field is in hours before its converting it to seconds,

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132357

So Planner is not constrained internally, but needs some minor
cleanups on its user input.

> Another issue, but rather minor, is that all my planing is in month and
> not days.

I had raised a bugzilla on this,
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132379
but this was marked as duplicate as the only real problems
are that lag field mentioned above (132357) and the display of
years also mentioned before (136940) so not really that much
to do.

> Furthermore I have crashed other OpenSource management tools with tasks
> above 100.

Planner won't crash at 100 - I haven't had it crash on my own projects
with over 100 tasks but I had found a bug which slowed the addition
of many links and the fix for this is planned for v0.13,

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=134273

You could argue that my test was a silly pathological case but
we don't always know how people are going to use Planner.

Some of that fix made 0.12 but we'd focused on UNDO/REDO stuff
with 0.12 so its not been signed off.

> Thus I am still looking for my OpenSource management tool which I could
> use now and for the 5 years to come for this big project !

I think Planner will be here in 5 years time when were all using
GNU/Linux 4.0 on GNOME 4.0/KDE 5.0 ! Maybe even MS Longhorn may be
out by then too ;) but you'll probably have to shift your host
on to Fedora or get your hosting company to move to
RH Enterprise ;)

Planner can no more be killed than any other Open Source project
so as long as there is GNOME and as long as there is always demand
for Project tools then there will be Planner. Planner would
probably slow if someone like MS ported MS Project to Linux,
knocked off a few decimal places on the price and maybe made it
Open Source - not likely !

Rgds,
Lincoln.

> Many thanks for your help.
>
> 	Best regards
>
> 		Jan 
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Planner mailing list
> Planner lists imendio com
> http://lists.imendio.com/mailman/listinfo/planner