[emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: projects; package interactions; planner-muse

[Sacha Chua]

address@hidden writes:

Hello, Chris!

> I started using Planner and EmacsWiki mid-December 2003, and fell in
> love with them - they are useful in so many ways, not least because
> when used in certain ways they are *extremely* useful in the
> 'virtual team'/'virtual project' environment. Good work, everybody!

I'm boggled by the idea that people actually use this as a
collaborative information manager (or whatever they call
not-quite-personal personal information managers). =) I think that's
one of the coolest things about open source. I might not have any need
for a virtual team environment, but other people have, so planner.el
does it! <grin>

> I now have two projects I want to use Planner for; I also wish to
> maintain a wiki or two, and at least one Journal.

Planner really started out as a single-project kind of thing: your
life. People have come up with elisp snippets to get it to work with
multiple projects, even access control and all sorts of other goodies.
=) I'm not very familiar with those parts of the code. I hope that
doesn't make me a bad maintainer; it's just that I haven't had to use
those features. <impish grin> But I'll package them anyway so that
people can share what they find useful.

> or scheme henceforth - these are the best, most productive languages
> I've used in 25 years of programming! (What can I say?, I guess I'm
> a late starter.)

Emacs is my favorite programming environment. =) I like the framework
it gives me. I still use Java or Perl for some things, but Emacs Lisp
gives me a warmer and fuzzier feeling.

> I am willing to do what I can to help out with EmacsWiki and
> Planner, although I can't say how much time I'll have available in
> the near future - though this *will* be a priority, since I will be
> relying heavily on these tools. So if I come up with anything that
> seems useful, I'll be more than happy to share.

<nod> One of the main strengths of Planner (and Emacs) is the extreme
customizability. PIMs like Microsoft Outlook and Ximian Evolution are
nice and pretty and they do most of what I want (or wanted, back
then), but there was just enough gap between how the software worked
and how _I_ worked to make me uncomfortable. <grin> Planner is tons
more fun, and it has opened up new ways of working I hadn't be able to
explore before. For example, I was surprised at how little attention I
could give to actually managing my tasks, notes, and todos. A PIM
should be as smart as it can be about your environment so that you can
quickly type in a task or note without getting distracted from your
real work, and planner-create-task-from-buffer and remember do that
really well.

> I run Emacs 21.2.1 on Debian Woody, kernel 2.4.bf18 (local) and
> Emacs 21.3.1 on FreeBSD 4.9 (remote), and would really, really like
> to keep Planner, etc. versions the same accross environments. I also
> have GNU Arch in both environments - I am really new to it, but it
> is rapidly growing on me.

That's wonderful! I'm still a relative newbie when it comes to
comparative Emacsology, but I try. =)

> I have EmacsWiki, Planner (w/notes, diary and timeclock) and Journal
> 'current' as of the first week of January this year. I somehow also
> managed, way back in December, to hack Gary Vaughan's html calendar
> widget into my daily planner pages.

Mmm, this is Gary Vaughan's emacs-wiki-journal, right? You might be
interested in the remember-emacs-wiki-journal module, then. <grin>

> Question 1: If I were to update all 3 packages to current stable
> versions, what are the odds of my stuff continuing to work?

Keep a backup of your stuff, switch over, and e-mail me if things
break? <sheepish grin> I know stability is really, really important
when it comes to your personal information, so I try not to break
stable (although it happens).

> Question 2: Do any documents, messages, etc. exist concerning the
> inter-dependencies between these packages? Specifically, EmacsWiki
> and Planner seem to use semi-separate project switching/project
> publishing environments?

Planner doesn't have its own project switching code, and depends on
emacs-wiki for all of its publishing. At its core, planner.el is just
a few markup rules and a whole lot of functions to conveniently
manipulate emacs-wiki markup. ;)

> Question 3: Has Gary's 'hierarchical' stuff been integrated into
> Planner and/or into EmacsWiki?

Semi. There are still a few problems.

> Question 4: What is the status of planner-muse? I haven't looked at
> Muse yet, but judging from the messages in the archive, planner-muse
> would seem a high-value project, if Muse is to be shipped with the
> new Emacs distros. One doesn't often get a chance to re-do the same
> project using what one has learned *and* a new, improved framework!

Meep, still frozen. Note to self: must learn how to use Muse
projects...

Ideally, the transition from emacs-wiki to muse should require no more
than one variable switch: planner-backend (used to exist, currently
doesn't). I had a rough compatibility layer before, but lost it when I
reorganized the archives into --dev and --stable instead of just one
--dev.

Would anyone like to take over that part? It's currently too broken to
add to --dev...
-- 
Sacha Chua <address@hidden> - Ateneo CS faculty geekette
interests: emacs, gnu/linux, making computer science education fun
http://sacha.free.net.ph/ - PGP Key ID: 0xE7FDF77C