hamster-gtk

A GTK interface to the hamster time tracker.

IMPORTANT At this early stage hamster-gtk is pre-alpha software. As such you are very welcome to take it our for a spin and submit feedback, however you should not rely on it to work properly and most certainly you should not use it in a production environment! You have been warned.

Dependencies

If you want to use the make register-gnome target desktop-file-install is required. On debian derivates this is provided by desktop-file-utils.

Installing from sources:

• xmllint (Needed in order to call resources make target. On debian this is part of the libxml2-utils package.

To Run the Testsuite

• make
• xvfb

First Steps

• Install dependencies (on debian if using virtualenvwrapper): install virtualenvwrapper python-gi gir1.2-gtk-3.0 libglib2.0-dev libgtk-3-dev. If you use python 3, you will need python3-gi instead.
• Create new virtual env: mkvirtualenv hamster-gtk
• Activate env: workon hamster-gtk
• Activate system site dirs: toggleglobalsitepackages. Otherwise you will have no access to Gtk.
• Install hamster-gtk: pip install hamster-gtk.
• Run the little furball: hamster-gtk

Some notes:

• Preference changes will only be applied at the next start right now.
• Exported data is tab separated.
• This is pre-alpha software!

How to run the testsuite

• Create a virtual environment mkvirtualenv hamster-gtk (python 2) or mkvirtualenv -p python3 hamster-gtk (python 3). Whilst those instructions do not reflect best practices (which would make use of python 3's built in venv) it does provide a better handling of system-site-packages. This issue provides some context for the problems one may run into using system-site-packages with python3 venvs. It is our hope that python 3.7 will fix this.
• enable access to system-site-packages for our virtual environment: $ toggleglobalsitepackages. This is needed to access our global GTK related packages.
• Install development environment: make develop.
• To run the actual testsuite: make test.
• To run tests and some auxiliary style checks (flake8, pep257, etc): make test-all.

Right now, our actual code testing does not utilize tox as we keep running into segfaults (which does not happen without tox). For this same reason we are currently unable to run our code tests on Travis as well (we still run the 'style checks' at least). We hope to get to the bottom of this at some point and would be most grateful if you have any hint or pointer that may help tracking down this issue.

Migrating from 'legacy hamster'

In case you are wondering “Will I be able to continue using my ‘legacy hamster’ database with this rewrite?” the answer is “yes and no.” This new version of hamster significantly raises the standard in terms of data consistency. Unlike before, it will not be possible to have “Facts” without an end time specified, nor to have multiple facts overlapping.

There will be a way to import data that still constitute valid “facts” (having both a start and an end time). We have, however, not decided on how this will be implemented, nor what to do with the legacy “facts” that do not have an end time.

The general timeline for addressing the actual implementation is: once we are feature freezing in preparation of release 1.0.0 as part of a more general pre-release cleanup effort.

Whilst possible, it is unlikely we will have the resources to provide a fancy looking GUI to resolve migration conflicts (unless someone new pitches in of course) so the result will most likely be a migration script of some sort.

If you are interested in this general issue, please feel free to watch the epic issue for "hamster-lib" that covers all things relevant.

News: Version 0.11.0

This release introduces refines various aspects of your Hamster-GTK experience. Whilst we introduce no new major dialogs (just a simple about-dialog). We catch up with the lastest version of hamster-lib, 0.12.0. The most noteworthy change for user is probably the ability to use whitespaces with your Activity.name. Besides that we fixed some rather anoying bugs as well as continued to refine the codebase. All in all, while still not big on features, this release should feel much more stable and reliable. This is not the least due to multiple contributions by jtojnar, thanks for that! As ususal, for more changes and details, please refer to the changelog. Happy tracking; Eric.