Changing the way exporters work

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   [email protected]    http://www.gentoo.org
Gnome Planner Developer  griffon26-bCGDfOjggl9Wk0Htik3J/[email protected]  http://live.gnome.org/Planner

_______________________________________________
Planner-dev-list mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/planner-dev-list

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.7 (GNU/Linux)

iD4DBQFH5irFMGnpIbeahxwRAuXbAJ0WrezDAxbTLpsTgO4WzqYMRLfs4wCYs5kz
70yLbhPuC5nkJGOAAUQoLw==
=/3GU
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----