Random notes from mg

a blog by Marius Gedminas

Marius is a Python hacker. He works for Programmers of Vilnius, a small Python/Zope 3 startup. He has a personal home page at http://gedmin.as. His email is marius@gedmin.as. He does not like spam, but is not afraid of it.

Fri, 18 Dec 2009

GTimeLog: not dead yet!

Back in 2004 I wrote a small Gtk+ app to help me keep track of my time, and called it GTimeLog. I shared it with my coworkers, put it on the web (on the general "release early, release often" principles), and it got sort-of popular before I found the time to polish it into a state where I wouldn't be ashamed to show it to other people.

Fast-forward to 2008: there are actual users out there (much to my surprise), I still haven't added the originally-envisioned spit and polish, haven't done anything to foster a development community, am wracked by guilt of not doing my maintainerly duties properly, which leads to depression and burnout. So I do the only thing I can think of: run away from the project and basically ignore its existence for a year. Unreviewed patches accumulate in my inbox.

It seems that the sabbatical helped: yesterday, triggered by a new Debian bug report, I sat down, fixed the bug, implemented a feature, applied a couple of patches languishing in the bug tracker, and released version 0.3 (which was totally broken thanks to setuptools magic that suddenly stopped working; so released 0.3.1 just now). Then went through my old unread email, created bugs in Launchpad and sent replies to everyone. Except Pierre-Luc Beaudoin, since his @collabora.co.uk email address bounced. If anyone knows how to contact him, I'd appreciate a note.

version is now shown in the about dialog

There are also some older changes that I made before I emerged out of the funk and so hadn't widely announced:

posted at 01:22 | tags: , | permanent link to this entry | 6 comments
FYI, WHOIS records list pierre-luc@pierlux.com as the contact address for pierlux.com.
posted by Adomas Paltanavičius at Fri Dec 18 03:25:05 2009
Pierre-Luc is at http://www.pierlux.com/ and there's a bunch of contact info there.  Yay gtimelog resurrection!
posted by Sumana Harihareswara at Fri Dec 18 04:02:49 2009
According to http://www.pierlux.com/, you can get in touch with Pierre-Luc on pierre-luc@pierlux.com
posted by Tollef Fog Heen at Fri Dec 18 10:08:00 2009
Hey, nice.  i have been using it in the past and just thought about it again the last days :)
cheers, holger
posted by holger krekel at Fri Dec 18 18:23:23 2009
Hello, Marius

SuperB news :)

+some semi-offtopic.  Once I've decided all my job could and should be done via unix console.  But am too disordered and self-contradicting so I wouldn't be able to use such tool properly. 

It would be nicer to have some software itself doing the task instead of me.  OK, all of my console commands, arguments and output can be logged via 'screen' or some such tool.  But what about changes if files eg. the same logs?

Would this be done, I could put off reviewing of my time sharing to the end of the day.  Esp. that at a given moment I cannot define my actions in an exact way.  While inexact way later becomes uninteresting.

When in review, I could stack changes from different files into some task-atoms I did during the day and direct then into some usual repository such as git or svn.

Total control of whatever I do on my machine with a little human effort!  And with ease of making reports.  Mariau, don't you agree? :)

Then I realized this needs some versioning FS.  Reiser4 probably could do some sort of the stuff at that time, but I had no support for it on my machine.  I found cvsfs, wayback, copyfs, gitfs -- all of them didn't worked as expected (or at all). 

Ideally it would be some FS layered on top of any usual FS.  Later I stuck upon ext3cow but it was self-contained FS.

My latest finding was svnfs but (1) it seemed also stagnating and (2) I don't know svn ;}

Plus I imagine eg. /etc directory mounted via such layered FS and changes accessible via svn or git... It could be magic wand even for newbie linux admin :)

I ended up with writing up some bash scripts committing changes to git repo. and by hooking up some events in vim to do the job.  Perfomance was horrible, and my life broke suddenly.  And so the work became into stagnation as well.

Mariau or anyone out there, weren't you thinking of going such route ever in your life?  May you have some hints regarding my sub-topic?  I guess, there should be easier way than developing new versioning FS layer!

Thanks for your time.
posted by s2 at Mon Dec 28 21:49:29 2009
Keep it up! This is a great app. It fulfills its specific purpose quite well.
posted by Forest Monsen at Fri Jan 21 01:49:58 2011

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