On Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 10:22:54AM -0400, Paul Natsuo Kishimoto wrote: > Some thoughts: Any "transforms" of task data should be REVERSIBLE and > BACKEND-AGNOSTIC. By REVERSIBLE I mean that: > Task A (Backend X) -> Task A (Local File) -> Task A (Backend X) > ...should result in an identical object in Backend X. > > Obviously this only applies where Backend X has a *less* sophisticated > task model than GTG—but there are lots of such cases (RTM, iCalendar... > did everyone see my spreadsheet? > http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AhRkDXhnjLt8dHM3MmZ0YmJnMm1UM1hySFNlaDBVc1E&hl=en_GB) > > By BACKEND-AGNOSTIC, I mean that if you have Backend X and Backend Y > that both support the same subset of the GTG data model, then: > Task A (Local File) -> Task A (Backend X) > Task A (Local File) -> Task A (Backend Y) > ...should produce the same result, *unless* there is some very good > reason to do otherwise.
This does seem quite wise. Looking at your spreadsheet, I wonder if one simple solution would be for gtg to retain any data items it does not recognize itself as "dark matter" (i.e. a dict stored with the task, that backends are welcomed to get/set stuff in, but that gtg just ignores.) In Inkscape early on there were a bunch of SVG properties we knew existed but that we had no GUI support for, so we just had a popup dialog with a dictionary list of these items so even though Inkscape didn't know what they were, the user could still access and tinker with them by hand. I think it would be pretty straightforward to generate a dialog like that in gtg that just programmatically generates a dialog with a list of label / text-input widgets for all the items in the dict. That might give a pretty good user experience for these cases for a minimum of effort on our part. _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~gtg-contributors Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~gtg-contributors More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
