[TW-1451] Allow for reports to display task dependency visually

[taskwarrior]

Renato Alves on 2014-11-06T21:04:55Z says:

Lets say this is another column formatter called description.dependencies. As a way to solve the problem of one task being parent to many tasks and also being daughter to many other tasks, a parent task can repeat itself multiple times in the output.

ID Age Description
 1 2w  Parent
 8 1w   Child2
 9 1d    Sub-Child2
 2 1w   Child1
 3 3d    Sub-Child1
 6 1d     Sub-Sub-Child1
 7 1h     Sub-Sub-Child2
 1 2w  Parent                   <- got repeated for being "too far apart" from the first representation (use colors to highlight the repetition)
 4 1w   Child2

The output could include a "..." if too many tasks depend on each other up until the parent.

ID Age Description
 1 2w  Parent
 2 1w   Child1
 . ..    ...
 9 1w    Sub-Sub-Sub-Sub-Sub-Sub-Sub-Child1

In the above examples "too far apart" and when should "..." be used could be made available as configurable settings with reasonable defaults.

With annotations and a small screen, the output could look like this:

ID Age Description
 1 2w  This is the parent
 2 1w   This is the long child with a description
        that gets wrapped.
         06-11-2014 20:31 and the annotation
                          follows
 3 2w  This is some other parent

[taskwarrior]

Migrated metadata:

Created: 2014-11-06T21:04:55Z
Modified: 2015-09-08T22:10:49Z

[taskwarrior]

David Patrick on 2014-11-08T02:10:47Z says:

Another alternative to changing the description, would be to add a new column-format for the depends attribute; "depends.tree" or "depends.symbol", that uses unicode symbols to represent dependency hierarchies.

It could look somewhat like the thread tree in mutt; http://floss.zoomquiet.io/data/20060815162659/index.html

When used in combination with, and sorted on, a depends.list column, it could visually represent a tree.

[taskwarrior]

Wim Schuermann on 2015-07-22T15:45:49Z says:

I wrote this: http://wbsch.de/2015-06-29_tw_hierarchy_poc.py a while back when someone asked about dependency hierarchies in #taskwarrior. Never got around to polishing it and just found this feature request.

I decided to start at the leaf nodes because it worked a lot better for my task list. Feel free to update the code or complain enough to spur me to action if you disagree with this or want that to be a configurable option.

[taskwarrior]

Paul Beckingham on 2015-07-22T16:08:11Z says:

Nice. I'm thinking that should be built-in, in which case I'll add it. Anyone agree/disagree?

[taskwarrior]

Tomas Babej on 2015-07-22T19:20:38Z says:

Add as in adding to the folder of example scripts? Can't hurt anybody, but we should give Wim a chance to polish it, if he wants.

Nevertheless, I can't say I envisioned this kind of functionality to be an external part of the TW. However, one nice possible integration point users can use would be to set a TW alias to execute this script.

[taskwarrior]

Paul Beckingham on 2015-07-22T22:00:21Z says:

My thinking was to move it in-core, ie convert to C++, make it available as a column format.