XML pickles have many benefits over taps, and the only issues they have
is not support 1.5 and 2.2 new-style classes. I suggest we make them the
default - a tap file is *much* less useful than a tax.
Given some of the chats I've had with Glyph regarding bug tracking,
customer support, and project management in Twisted, here's a nice
overview article that provides some concrete definitions and feature
descriptions for each. Note the "Workflow Management" paragraph where
the author claims that the above mentioned systems are instances of
Workflow Management and a system built around workflow management
abstractions could be 'trivially' used to develop the others.
http://linas.org/linux/pm.html
Looking at the numerous examples of partial implementations of these
various systems out there, it seems that it is easy to start one of
these projects, but hard to get it to the point where it is actually
useful (and I'm specifically looking at project management here).
Apparently there was a project manager called Xen for Zope, but it seems
dead now.
But here are two interesting bits of code that could be incorporated
into a Twisted-based project manager -- PyGantt, which take an
XML-formatted project description and generates an HTML Gantt chart; and
an O'Reilly article that describes something similar with Piddle.
http://www.logilab.org/pygantt/http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2001/05/31/piddle.html
PyGantt is neat because it could be modified to generate hyperlinked
project task titles that would go to a task description dialog (or
page). Dates could also be hyperlinked for editing. The XML part could
be factored out into import/export, and the project description could be
instead accessed from project-tree and task-node instances in Twisted.
Having a way to represent "user stories" and "use cases" as task nodes
would be cool. Then Roark could (ahem, when I get time to help Matt
work on it) be used to create and edit use cases and other modeling
entities and the task manager could be used to schedule and track
progress on them.
Cheers,
Jason
