Activity Digest: June 2015

This is an ongoing series of activity reports, published monthly, to highlight activity in the Taskwarrior project. Here is what happened in June 2015.

Date
2015-06-02Tasksh gains the ability to detect terminal width, and display colored banners.
2015-06-02Tasksh gains UTF-8 support.
2015-06-02Tasksh gains a more polished review command, which manages a GTD-like review session of your tasks, remembering where it left off, and not revisiting tasks too often. With upcoming Taskwarrior enhancements, this feature will be functional.
2015-06-03A JSON parser memory leak was fixed, which is likely the cause of the long-standing non-linear performance of the parser.
2015-06-03Tasksh gains a stub of a shell command, to run external software.
2015-06-04When listing contexts, the active context is now also shown. This is as close as Taskwarrior gets to being user-friendly.
2015-06-05The task edit command no longer borks annotations when newlines \n are found in the description.
2015-06-05The sin of modifying a task to depend on another, when it already does so, has been downgraded from error to NOP.
2015-06-05The unit test framework gains more capabilities, and more tests are migrated from Perl to Python. Why are we migrating? There are two main reason to move to Python: there is more enthusiasm for Python in the community, and our Python test framework is gaining some very powerful features. One in particular is the degree of isolation between test scripts, which is allowing us to parallelize the test suite. Although we could easily improve the Perl framework, we have decided not to.
2015-06-06The test framework gains the ability to do some very suspicious things like test the task edit feature. Magic.
2015-06-06Wisdom gained: Even the most trivial change needs to be tested for idiocy.
2015-06-06The command line parser, the darkest, most disturbing part of Taskwarrior, begins to be beaten into shape. First up: clean up the worst of the cruft.
2015-06-07The project verbosity token now implies the footnote token. This is the beginning of a more sensible cascading mechanism for verbosity.
2015-06-09Many polymorphic text formatting functions are converted to C++11 variadic templates. An exciting day for Taskwarrior users!
2015-06-09The unit test suite, with shocking honesty, now declares tests as not expected to pass, rather than commenting them out and pretending they don’t exist. It’s becoming harder to lie about features working.
2015-06-11The TAP output generated by the test suite becomes more verbose and useful.
2015-06-11The BY and RU holiday files now include International Women’s Day, which was mistakenly omitted.
2015-06-13Once again, there are two command line parsers in Taskwarrior, the current one, and a new shadow parser that will grow to become better than the current one, ultimately replace it. Why are we doing this? 1. Parsers are fun! 2. Destabilizing code is exciting 3. The command line evolves and the parser needs to catch up 4. Bugs, Bee populations 5. All of the above – Correct answer is (5).
2015-06-19The command line parser learned to recognized ID ranges in a much better way.
2015-06-21Taskwarrior wasn’t recognizing the form due=now and due.before=today, but no one appears to have noticed.
2015-06-22Fixed a bug where proj was neither recognized as the command projects, or the attribute project.
2015-06-22Fixed a bug where a second terminator -- was considered to be another terminator, but it should have been considered just text.
2015-06-22The test suite now recognizes cases where tests pass, but were expected to fail, and flags this. Prior to this, these cases were hard to spot.
2015-06-22The library dependency GnuTLS is now required, unless the cmake option -DENABLE_SYNC=OFF is specified. There have just been too many folks installing binary packages with no sync capability, that then need to builds from source. That’s just cruel.
2015-06-22Fixed bug where UUID’s were considered string, and not properly filtered.
2015-06-24Fixed problem where ‘pair’ type arguments (name:value) were not properly downgraded to ‘text’ when they were not recognized.
2015-06-25The test suite overhaul, and Python conversion is now at the point where most of the tests are no longer Perl tests.
2015-06-25The test suite overhaul continues, and the old --fast option is now the default, and the whole test suite runs in under twenty seconds (on this arbitrary piece of hardware), because of parallelization. The run_all and problems scripts are updated with more details, options and easy-to-interpret color. The test suite is becoming a much more powerful debugging tool.
2015-06-27Taskwarrior loses support for ambiguous ISO-8601 date formats, such as YYYYMMDD and hhmmss for time. This leaves the clearer extended forms (YYYY-MM-DD and hh:mm:ss) intact, and the old forms still available via rc.dateformat. This reduces command line parser ambiguity - a good thing.
2015-06-27For years now, deleting a task has generated feedback that says it is ‘permanently’ removed. This it not true, especially with the undo command. Fixed.
2015-06-27Taskwarrior now produces an error if you try to modify a virtual tag. Previously this succeeded, but the presence of the tag was hidden.
2015-06-30A sync error message was corrected to stop it from lying to users about account enabling.