Re: Extending timeclock.el

[John Wiegley <johnw@gnu.org>]

>>>>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> I'll eventually contact the original author as well, but I wanted to know
>> of any other opinions here first.

> John Wiegley, the original author is somewhat busy these days, but we can
> add him to this discussion right away. Here, done.

Hi fellow John, I'm happy to hear you're thinking of extending timeclock. It
only ever strived to be the most basic form of data collection possible, with
the hope that other functionality and UIs could be built on top of it. My
ledger tool, for example, directly reads timelog files in order to provide
reports summarized by week, month, account, etc.

If you do extend the _format_, it's likely you may break some of the other
tools that process timelog data. So if you choose to make an enriched format,
it would be useful if you provided a way to export this data back to flat
timelog form (such as by stripping comments). Then I could go from
timeclock-modern format -> timeclock format -> ledger, for example.

Otherwise, I'm available here by e-mail, and always happy to provide context
that may help with your decision making. Best of luck with getting this new
code ultimately into Emacs or ELPA!

--
John Wiegley                  GPG fingerprint = 4710 CF98 AF9B 327B B80F
http://newartisans.com                          60E1 46C4 BD1A 7AC1 4BA2