Re: [NonGNU Elpa] New package: ETT

[John Task]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> Anyway, did you consider extending existing packages with those modern
> features, instead of making a completely new separate package?

Honestly, I didn't consider it.  However, I'm seeing what timeclock.el
currently does, as it is the most similar to my package, and I think I
would gain very little by using it as a starter point.  I'll explain
why.

1. Design principles

timeclock has not the same design principles.  It tries to address the
problem of tracking work time; that's why it has "projects", as well
as functions such as timeclock-when-to-leave-string,
timeclock-workday-remaining-string, et cetera.  ETT tries to track
time in general; it can be used in order to track what do you do on a
workday, but it's also designed to track what do you read on
vacations, when do you eat, and so on.

2. Conflicts

Following point 1, a lot of features from timeclock and ETT conflict
with each other at a basic level because of how they are designed.  On
ETT, there's no "clock-out", because the idea is to track everything,
or everything possible at least.  On timeclock, you have to leave a
message when you clock-out, which doesn't make sense on ETT, not only
because there's no clock-out at all but also because if you just
finished eating, leaving a message is pointless.

3. Features

Again, ETT has a different goal, and tries to approach it in its own
way.  ETT has tags; tags are not needed in timeclock and I don't really
want to change that in order to support something timeclock was not
designed for.  ETT has goals.  ETT has a parser that takes into account
all the oddities of its very own .ett file.  Implementing all of this
for timeclock would be less efficient and would definitely break most
(if not all) existent workflows.

I get your intentions, but all things considered, I think everything
is better as is.

Best regards.