use as a todo/task management app?
Robert William Vesterman <[email protected]> Sun, 26 Feb 2023 19:59:05 -0500
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.mozilla.devel.webtools |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
This may be somewhat crazy, but I've never been satisfied with any of the todo/task management apps that I know of, mostly because of a single common issue that they all suffer from (in my opinion), and it suddenly occurred to me a few minutes ago that the typical bug-tracking app could be massaged into being a todo/task management app that does /not /suffer from this. So, I'm now wondering whether there are any /different/ reasons that this wouldn't be a good use case for Bugzilla (or something like it). As background, I've used Bugzilla to actually report bugs on various projects, but I've never used it running on my own server, or to work on bugs that someone has reported. To back up a bit, the issue that I'm referring to is that it always seems like relations between tasks can only be structured as trees (well, forests, really): Any particular task can have at most one parent task. For me, it always seems much more natural to be able to have multiple parents for a single task (i.e. the tasks should form an acyclic directed graph, not necessarily a forest). For a contrived example: In real life, the "Bake a cake" task depends upon the "Buy flour" task, which depends upon the "Go grocery shopping" task. Typical todo/task apps can handle this just fine, insofar as described. But the problem comes up when you realize that going grocery shopping can be a dependence for a whole bunch of things completely unrelated to baking a cake (e.g. buying Liquid Plumber), while at the same time in the other direction, baking a cake can be dependent upon a whole bunch of things completely unrelated to going grocery shopping (e.g. fixing the oven). I realize that there are workarounds for this sort of thing - e.g. allowing a task to have arbitrary "tags", or making multiple in-app tasks all meaning "Bake a cake", but these always seem very kludgy to me, and I can't help but think using the app would be much simpler if it were just able to represent multi-parented tasks in the first place. But, like I said, it just suddenly occurred to me that something like Bugzilla does /not/ have this problem. For example: * Bug "Don't have cake" is blocked by bug "Don't have flour"; * Bug "Don't have cake" is blocked by bug "Oven isn't working"; * Bug "Don't have flour" is blocked by bug "Need to go to the grocery store"; * Bug "Toilet is clogged" is blocked by bug "Don't have Liquid Plumber"; * Bug "Don't have Liquid Plumber" is blocked by bug "Need to go to the grocery store". Obviously you wouldn't have to describe the tasks in terms of being "bugs", but (A) I'm putting it in Bugzilla-esque terms just to show the idea, and (B) I kind of like it, tbh :P Crazy or not, that sounds pretty great to me, so now I'm just generally asking "Are there any other reasons why Bugzilla might not be great for this?", plus some specific questions based on that general question: (1) Is there a way (preferably an easily usable way) to do things like "Show me all current blockers", ordering by priority and/or due date? I'm guessing the answer is "Yes, of course", but more specifically: (2) Can things like "priority" and "due date" in that refer not simply to the blocker in and of itself, but also to the things that it blocks? For example, I might decide one day that I should (for no particular reason) buy some flour, and thus add a "Buy flour" task with priority "Low". But the next day, I might REALLY REALLY NEED CAKE, so I'd add a "Bake a cake" task with priority "Critical". In the report, I would like the "Buy flour" task to then be considered "Critical", without me needing to go and manually update that task. And if I then buy enough flour to bake a cake but for some reason /not/ enough to cover all my upcoming, low-priority predicted baking needs, I'd like "Buy flour" to /automatically/ revert to "Low" in the report after I mark "Bake a cake" as being done. (3) This is really a would-be-nice rather than a need, but: How about ordering by something like... not sure of the actual terminology to use, but... the /combined weight/ of the things that the blocker blocks? So something along the lines of a blocker that blocks a bunch of critical tasks being more important than a blocker that only blocks a few critical tasks. (4) Same not-really-a-need sort of thing: What about repeating tasks? Is there a reasonably easy way to submit the same sort of bug every week or whatever? I mean, that cake I bake today isn't gonna last for the rest of my life. Please help. I really need cake. _______________________________________________ support-list mailing list [email protected] https://lists.bugzilla.org/listinfo/support-list