Taskwarrior: is taskwarrior stagnant?

[seniorivn]

topic on reddit

The lack of commits from @pbeckingham is obvious, he probably has his reasons, but the problem is that no one seams to be ready to replace him.

• Is it the end of taskwarrior development?
• What should we do?

[gour]

What should we do?

Few times I was jumping between Taskwarrior and org-mode and always find the former much better suited for my workflow, but I was always bitten by TW's poor recurring support which "simply works" within org-mode, so, personally, I'll simply switch (back) to org-mode and stop worrying...If I'd have more free time or, even better, required C++ skills to help, I'd try to contribute to the project, but lacking both. :-(

[wbsch]

Should Paul ever decide to drop Taskwarrior development altogether, the project will definitely be cared for. As of today, he has not let us (the people who for the last two years have met up for 2-4 days of FOSDEM / Taskwarrior goodness and lots of Italian food in Brussels with him) know that he has any intention of dropping it in the near future.

If you have any features and/or bug fixes you'd like to see released, feel free to open a ticket (or search for one - most features have been asked about before), ask for feedback on whether or not code written for it would have any chance of being included in Taskwarrior, then go ahead and code it.

If you can't code, then it'd be best to try as hard as you might to get someone else interested in spending time on it. I've been known to implement features (mostly as hooks, ever since those started being a viable option) for people on a whim, but not without proper motivation. Motivation, for me, mostly consists of having a "Damn, that WOULD be cool to have!" moment.

So, as to your first point: No, it isn't.
As to your second point: See above, unless you think there's something else to do here?

[tbabej]

@seniorivn There are only two things that can be done when a project you want to progress does not progress at a pace you like: either donate your time (and skills) to the cause, or donate money to the cause.

While crowdfunding TW is unlikely to support a full-time engineer's salary, it could be sufficient to generate couple of student grants, who could then grow to be longer-term contributors.

[tbabej]

Note that skills is not only "C++ coding skills", these can also be other maintenance tasks, such as:

• helping users on the #taskwarrior IRC channel
• maintaining the bug tracker (i.e. trying to reproduce old bugs or linking related issues)
• improving the documentation

[crocket]

I think merging pull requests fast should be done before even thinking about lack of manpower. When pull requests are merged quickly, contributors are more likely to come back and they will come back more often.

C4 process from zeromq community describes how to merge pull requests quickly without wasting maintainers' time while ensuring stability.

I mentioned this because I think the bottleneck is the maintainers who have other more important priorities in life than thoroughly reviewing patches to various softwares. C4 removes that kind of bottleneck well.

[tbabej]

@crocket are there particular PRs you have in mind here?

[crocket]

@tbabej Nothing in particular. I was talking about merging pull requests quickly in general. I recommend merging them all if they don't break public API.

If you want to learn about zeromq community process in details, I suggest reading

• http://hintjens.com/blog:106
• http://hintjens.com/blog:117#toc29
• https://rfc.zeromq.org/spec:42/C4/

[meonkeys]

This is a helpful and answered discussion. I vote we resolve it!

[tbabej]

@crocket I don't think this has been true for the lifetime of TW development at all - quite the opposite, in fact. New enhancements tend to get scrutinized in order to ensure the simplicity of the software and reasonable maintenance burden on the maintenance team.

[crocket]

Although it'd be better for you to have direct experience of C4 in some way, direct experience will guide your decisions in any case.

[pbeckingham]

topic on reddit

The lack of commits from @pbeckingham is obvious, he probably has his reasons, but the problem is that no one seams to be ready to replace him.

• Is it the end of taskwarrior development?
• What should we do?

You could have just asked me.