Reasons to start and to stop «mrprojext»
About the Reasons to Write the 'MrProjExt'
MrProject was a very ambitious eyecandy und intuitively usable project management tool. (Yes, this is not a typo: for a moment I am talking about MrProject instead of MrProjext!) But MrProject lacked some practically whished features:
- Very often I need an extract of all those tasks which shall be fullfilled by one person or one group of persons.
- Or I must generate an extract containing all tasks of a specific timeslot, for example of a week. (BTW: that is nescessary if I want to make MrProject printing only one week instead of the whole project durance.)
- Or I wish to be able to export the content of the MrProject database into a form by which I could present the content to other people or to import the content into other applications like Gnomecal, Evolution, Yank or my palm pilot.
Regarding these wishes I've discovered that I would need a MrProject-Extractor which were able to change and rewrite a Mrproject database. Because a Mrproject database is nothing more than an xml-file, my wish seems to be realizable ... And the end of this story is the birth of MrProjext, a MrProject-Extractor: The original Mrproject database acts as a masterfile out of which a smaller content will be extracted.
About the Reasons to Stop 'MrProjExt'
Mrproject should be a clone of MS-Project. And in the beginning it was part of the gnome-(office)-project. But nowadays it is outdated: The url of the original company «mrproject.codefactory.se», which has published mrproject, is no longer reachable. And in some wikis one can read that mrproject has been stopped and that it is replaced by planner, the GNOME project management tool.
By regarding this situation it is no longer opportune to maintain an addon for the outdated mrproject. The only correct way would be a reimplementation as something like plannext. But today and with respect to the pmi I argue that my original wishes should better be fullfilled by the work breakdown structure and the activity list of project, not by the schedule plan. Therefore I closed the project MrProjExt and probably I won't reopen it again.