[Todo-manager-cvs] Altering To-Do Manager for Tracking Time on Projects.

[Eric H. - M. <eho...@da...>]

I am interested in a having a method for entering time spent on tasks. 
This data entry would be mostly done off line and perhaps aggregated 
with data from a Palm Pilots (but perhaps not). In other words I am 
interested in creating import/export plugins for this data. I have 
considered a number of the time tracking applications on source forge, 
but none of them has exactly what I am looking for and if I was to alter 
anything I want it to be both cross platform and in Python :}.

It seems to me that To-Do manager is very close to what I need with the 
exception that I want to record sessions working on tasks rather than 
to-do items themselves. Even the categories are similar, in my case I 
want the categories to be fixed (by me) and more extensive than what 
comes TO-DO Manager but the concept is almost identical.

Although I have done a fair amount of python programming, I have done no 
GUI programming. My first thought was to take To-Do Manager and then 
hack it into what I wanted. On looking at the python I realize that it 
is much more complex (in good ways e.g. internationalization, plug in 
architecture) than what I had thought of dealing with.  I also tumbled 
to the realized as I looked through the code and played with the 
application that each to-do items turn into a number of work session 
each of which has times, miles and expenses (data of interest to me) and 
so even though I do not want to deal with the complexity of that 
connection now, I am thinking that adding the time on tasks in a way 
that would allow them to be joined at some later time would be a benefit.

As I contemplate the feasibility of doing this, I am wondering if you 
would have any suggestions on how to cleanly add these features to TO-DO 
Manager. I notice:
self.__interfaces = []	# Multiple interface bindings, I've gone mad

Is this where you would start or would you suggest adding a "view work 
sessions" option on the view menu and then alter self.update_list(). I 
guess it is clear to you that the purpose of __interfaces is not clear 
to me.

Would you think that another file for this new data would be optimal or 
would you suggest creating another set of tags [work_session], 
[end_work_session] and leaving all the data in one place.

Would the project be interested in having these kind of features in the 
CVS tree?

Sincerely
Eric Howland