Re: Re: Becoming a fisherman

On Thursday, Nov 6, 2003, at 08:56 US/Pacific, Petr Kuzel wrote:

> Mick Wever wrote:
>
>> Although I don't understand why you wouldn't just keep the 'Scan for
>> Suggestions' action as it provides the functionality and in a static 
>> way!
>> My vote would be to keep this action.
>
> I think about separating suggestions into two user classes:
>   - todos (from source or from a todolist)
>   - suggestions (from source analysis suggestion providers)
>
> I do not want to overload the Tools menu with extra actions:
>   - Scan for TODOs (only todo suggestions possibly mixed with tasklist)
>   - Analyze Code... (renamed Scan for suggestions)

I'm a little confused by this.

Why do you want to treat TODOs different from other suggestions? Will 
you merge these with user tasks (e.g. tasks entered into the user task 
view), and if so, what will you show in the treetable?

For what it's worth, this is how the tasklist used to work; there was a 
single view which merged both user-entered tasks, and implied/scanned 
tasks (TODOs scanned from source.)  I was able to selectively update 
the scanned todos when the file was edited, even though keeping things 
ordered etc. was a bit challenging.

But when I added iCal support I thought this was no longer feasible.

Tasks in the user view have all sorts of attributes - date created, 
category, date last edited, due date, etc., that make them very 
separate from things like TODO comments in the source.    Similarly, 
user tasks entered need to be stored in an iCal file - but you probably 
shouldn't store scanned tasks there (the truth should be in the 
source).  (In the old behavior, I marked Tasks "temporary" and 
temporary tasks would not get written out to the file).

Thus, the user task view has default columns like priority and 
category, which don't make sense for scanned tasks. Similarly, the 
suggestions view has default columns like file and line, which 
typically don't make sense for user tasks (if the task is really about 
a source line, don't make a user task for it, write it into the 
comment!).

By the way, the "Suggestions View" isn't only for suggestions - the 
name is a bit unfortunate; I would like to rename it "Tasks" (although 
that starts to get ambiguous with User Tasks", TODO: think of better 
name.)   For example, if you get errors from editing the java file 
(background compilation), the errors themselves are displayed. 
Likewise, if you have any user tasks whose Due Dates are within the 
next 36 hours (e.g. typically "today" or "tomorrow"), these are also 
listed in the suggestions view - "I suggest you handle these right 
now!".

Sorry for the rambling - just thought some of this might help and I'm 
really curious to hear your thoughts on this.