I happen to really like the program known as devtodo (http://swapoff.org/DevTodo) which is aimed at developers who want a nice and easy way to manage a todo list. I have been using it for a little while for fuppes individually but today converted the TODO list that you can find in the fuppes svn into a devtodo ‘.todo’ file. And as a result we have nice todo list that we can both share. The positives of using devtodo include:
- The database file for devtodo is in non-random (or sane) XML; which means that many different people using devtodo to edit the todo file should not be able to make changes that will corrupt it. I am hoping to find that there are no merging errors and it stays rosy.
- You can prioritise everything nicely from five different importance levels
- You can filter the todo list easily. For example, running the ‘todo done’ command gives you every item that is complete. Very useful if you are say, writing a debian/changelog.
- You can purge items from the database as well so that it never gets too large. Though I cannot see myself doing this; too much useful information is retained otherwise.
All in all this is a very favorable move and I think that it is just one of the little things that can benefit from some more organisation. I just wish that there was a feature to allow converting the done items on the todo list into a debian/changelog. That would be ridiculously useful but unfortunately it does not seem to exist; ‘changelog2todo’ exists in /usr/share/devtodo/contrib but todo2changelog seems mysteriously absent. Maybe I’ll just write it myself; we’ll see.
Still working steadily on fuppes. It’s all getting there and every little bit helps.
Programming by Robert Massaioli 