#540 Load task file automatically from AppImage?

[Marcel Niederer]

Hello guys,

first of all, many thanks for this great software. Thats exactly what I need.
Anyhow, I have two things I would like to ask:

1. Since I cannot get the source to run on Ubuntu 20.04 I use the AppImage.
   Is it possible to load the task file on startup with the AppImage and how could I do this?

2. Do you have plans to get the source packaged and running on Ubuntu 20.04? I'd prefer to run the application from the source (~2 MB in size) rather than from a sealed AppImage (~114MB).

Many thanks and best regards
Marcel

[Aaron Wolf]

Maybe Jerome can add more details, but the summary is:

The AppImage is probably a bit hacky and not a perfect solution, but it's possible to look into it about the file loading

The package being more nicely integrated in systems really will require the finishing of port to Python3, and that's only something going extremely slow, little bits here and there. We gratefully welcome anyone who wants to help with that process. If that is ever completed, then we can look into packaging it natively. There's also a goal to switch from wxWidgets to Qt which would unblock Task Coach for really finally improving the whole thing and getting it back to being a maintained program with future potential. At this point, it's hard to see how we'll get there, but it's possible, especially if we ever get some new dedicated contributors to join the efforts.

[Marcel Niederer]

Hello Aaron,

thanks for the reply.
I really can imagine how much work this is if you do it voluntary in your free time and have a job and other things going on. Hope you find some guys contributing, it's a cool software.

Is there a special reason why you want to switch to Qt?

Best regards
Marcel

[Aaron Wolf]

I don't know precisely why Jerome is interested in moving to Qt, maybe from mixed or mediocre experience with wxwidgets in the past. Moving to the latest up-to-date wxwidgets wouldn't be crazy. I haven't myself looked into how well it's going as a framework.

[Jérome Laheurte]

Qt is a well-designed OO framework. wx is a heap of special cases that breaks apart every time you want to do something not "mainstream". For the sake of my mental health I don't want to maintain wx code any more... Anyway since doing both at the same time would be too difficult, the current effort is on Python3 + wx4, then we'll see

[Ilya Rezvin]

the current effort is on Python3 + wx4

Didn't you mean Python3 + qt4?
Also is there some place where code for work-in-progress of new version is located, or it's not published yet?

[Jérome Laheurte]

The main effort is on Py3. Doing PyQt concurrently would be a nightmare since I couldn't even test anything before I'm completely finished, so I'm doing py3+wx4, and then Qt5 (or 6, depends when). Everything is in the hg repo. And it's moving very slowly.

[Ilya Rezvin]

Thanks for clarification! So this mercurial repo isn't published anywhere yet?

[Jérome Laheurte]

It is; second "Code" tab in the SF interface. I know this is confusing :(

https://sourceforge.net/p/taskcoach/repo/ci/default/tree/

[Ilya Rezvin]

Indead it is (it turned out to be last "tab" in the row)! Thanks a lot for clarification and thanks for great project (I'm happy user since 2009)

[Jérome Laheurte]

I'll take a look. I'm not sure I want to go back to the maintenance nightmare of native packages.

[Aaron Wolf]

Hi, excited to tell you that https://github.com/taskcoach/taskcoach now has updated Python3 Task Coach packages for Debian and Ubuntu based systems, you can try the AppImage, but I'm using the .deb options and everything is working for me. Give it a try and report bugs there, cheers!

Maybe the AppImage will still have this task-loading issue, and if you test and see so, please open a GitHub issue (or just reply here, I'll still see it). But I imagine you'll just use the .deb and have no issues.