Taskwarrior: Task numbers change after completion of another task

[mgiugliano]

I would like to report a systematic bug, which prevents me from quickly "completing" tasks without every time getting their task number.

• I ran "task 40 done"
• I expected task n. 40 to disappear from the list and all other tasks to retain their own original number.
• Other two tasks changed their numbers from 116 to 115 and from 117 to 116, in an completely unrelated manner.
• Below I paste the output of the task diag command.

task 2.5.1
Platform: Darwin

Compiler
Version: 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 11.0.0 (clang-1100.0.33.8)
Caps: +stdc +stdc_hosted +LP64 +c8 +i32 +l64 +vp64 +time_t64
Compliance: C++11

Build Features
Built: Oct 16 2019 19:08:34
CMake: 3.15.4
libuuid: libuuid + uuid_unparse_lower
libgnutls: 3.6.10
Build type: Release

Configuration
File: /Users/####/.taskrc (found), 3945 bytes, mode 100644
Data: /Users/####/Dropbox/task (found), dir, mode 40755
Locking: Enabled
GC: Enabled
$EDITOR: /usr/local/bin/vim
Server: taskwarrior.inthe.am:53589
CA: ~/.dotfiles/task/ca.cert.pem, readable, 2405 bytes
Trust: ignore hostname
Certificate: ~/.dotfiles/task/private.certificate.pem, readable, 2650 bytes
Key: ~/.dotfiles/task/private.key.pem, readable, 20127 bytes
Ciphers: NORMAL
Creds: inthe_am/####/************

Hooks
System: Enabled
Location: /Users/####/Dropbox/task/hooks
(-none-)

Tests
$TERM: xterm-256color (240x60)
Dups: Scanned 275 tasks for duplicate UUIDs:
No duplicates found
Broken ref: Scanned 275 tasks for broken references:
No broken references found

[kwoot]

Hi Michele,
I am NOT one of the developers of taskwarrior but just a regular user.
The way I see it, if a task get's done then the list of "current" tasks get reassigned.
All tasks have also a unique and permanent ID, see "task info" to see it.
I hope this helps you.
Regards,
Jeroen

[mgiugliano]

Thank you, @kwoot . If this is the intended behaviour, a similar reassignment is inconvenient and annoying and prevents quick completion of several tasks at once.

[duckunix]

@mgiugliano I think you might want to go read https://taskwarrior.org/docs/ids.html . Basically, if you mark a task done or deleted, and you do not run a report, you can keep the numbers from before. However, if you run a report, then the garbage collector run and the tasks are renumbered.

The docs has a way to override that.

[kdheepak]

For what it is worth, this is one of the primary reasons I built a terminal user interface for taskwarrior: https://github.com/kdheepak/taskwarrior-tui. I wanted to perform a sequence of multiple actions without running task {report} between each step.

[mgiugliano]

@duckunix
Thank you. However I first became aware of this issue precisely as I was not invoking "task" to get a report printed on screen. And yet I inadvertently flagged other tasks as competed.

[dixius99]

For what it is worth, this is one of the primary reasons I built a terminal user interface for taskwarrior: https://github.com/kdheepak/taskwarrior-tui. I wanted to perform a sequence of multiple actions without running task {report} between each step.

That TUI makes me want to get back into using Taskwarrior more regularly. (currently using Org Mode because I like it a little better in relation to how recurring tasks work)

[kdheepak]

I am always envious of org mode and its features!

[gour]

I am always envious of org mode and its features!

Ex-tw user here - just try etm-dgraham - all org-mode recurring stuff is there. ;)

[tbabej]

The IDs are indeed not meant to be persistent, as they represent just the row number in the pending.data file. For persistent references to a given task, check out UUIDs. More info can be found on this page in the docs.