[kplato] [Planner Dev] Planner maintainership

[Thomas Zander]

On Friday 21 October 2005 09:47, Dag Andersen wrote:
> > So, I would be open to discuss merging of any (open source) project
> > management applications and would be very happy if human resources
> > could be brought together.
>
> Just for the record, I'm not against merging KPlato with TaskJuggler,
> but as you noted above Raphael, the approach is very different, so
> imho it won't be a piece of cake to do, especially before release of
> 1.5.

I'm a bit weary of trying a merge. Initially it looks nice but unless we 
intend to just cannibalize TJ for cool code any result we get from a 
merge will either make us or the TJ people extremely unhappy.

The thing is; the reason KPlato is in KOffice is because we wanted to make 
data from kspread/kexi available to KPlato. Think resources being updated 
while you enter some numbers in your spreadsheet.
On the output side KPlato can use KChart (which can be extended if needed) 
and use those charts in a presenter or KWord doc.

Or, in other words, a planner tool in and of itself is kind of useless; 
you have to provide data to it and use the date coming out of it.  
Corporation with other people simply needs that.
This is where KPlato will shine as KOffice will provide a whole workflow 
instead of an app to get your data out of.

Back to taskjuggler;  their approach is very different from the one I 
described above.  The GUI on top of TJ also does not even try to follow 
the workflow options KOffice can offer.
This leads me to conclude that merging will result in a very weird 
monstrosity that neither the koffice people nor the TJ people will 
appreciate.

Naturally; if the TJ people can subscribe to the KOffice point of view; 
great!  I'm just not holding my breath :)

> A note on TaskJugglers fileformat: It's designed to easily be
> read/edited by humans (it's really their user interface) so imvvho I
> don't think they will ever have a native XML based format. (But maybe
> a conversion tool?)

Yeah; the creation of a good and common file format would be the major 
thing to do right now.  I'm sure that the TJ people would be able to read 
and write to any xml-based fileformat we come up with (as long as its 
extendible) via some converter or filter plugin to TJ.

Cheers!
-- 
Thomas Zander
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