Below you find information about running, testing, installing, and developing Task Coach.
Task Coach - Your friendly task manager
Copyright (C) 2004-2016 Task Coach developers <[email protected]>
Copyright (C) 2009 George Weeks <[email protected]>
Task Coach is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Task Coach is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
If you clone the sources from GitHub, you will notice that it might take a long time more than you expect (Hundreds MB!!).
So you have better just checkout a few versions (500?) like this:
git clone --depth=500 https://github.com/taskcoach/taskcoach.git
It's more faster than clone the whole history (There lots archives inside the history tree)
You need Python version 3.8 or higher, wxPython version 4.2.1-unicode or higher and Twisted. See http://www.taskcoach.org/devinfo.html for more details and platform specific notes.
For building distributions and running tests, GNU make is used. Make is installed on most systems by default. On Windows you can install Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com) to get make and a lot of other nice utilities. Make will automatically use the file Makefile as its script, unless directed otherwise. Makefile in turn uses "pymake.py" to build distributions. So, if you don't have make installed you can still build the distributions by running the commands from the Makefile by hand.
Since 2012/10/14 you will also need tar, gzip and patch to unpack the third party modules. Those are part of Cygwin.
In order to build the executable on Windows with py2exe you'll need to hack zope.interface (a Twisted dependency) as described here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7816799/getting-py2exe-to-work-with-zope-interface
Starting with 1.4.4 you'll also need python-igraph. Binaries are available for Windows, but installing this on OSX is a bit difficult. The best way is probably to install the C core using Brew, and then the Python extension using pip:
brew install gcc
brew tap homebrew/science
brew install --use-gcc --universal igraph
sudo pip install python-igraph
Note that --universal is needed because wxWidgets 2.x is 32-bits only; --use-gcc is needed because of a bug in recent versions of the XCode command-line tools, which make the link fail.
Task Coach needs a few generated files, run the following command to generate them:
make prepare
Start Task Coach from the command line like this:
python taskcoach.py
To run the tests, enter:
make unittests
Check out the Makefile for more testing options. The test script has a bunch of options as well, enter:
cd tests; python test.py --help
for more information.
To create test coverage reports, you need to install coverage.py (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/coverage/). Install with:
sudo easy_install coverage
To create a coverage report, enter:
make coverage
The coverage report is written to tests/coverage.out.
Use the Makefile to create distributions (they are placed in dist/):
make windist # Creates installer for Windows
make dmg # Creates disk image for Mac OS X
make rpm # Creates generic RPM
make fedora # Creates RPM for Fedora 8 or later
make deb # Creates Debian package for Debian and Ubuntu
Check out the Makefile for more details. E.g. to create the Task Coach app on Mac OS X you can also run:
python pymake.py py2app
The TaskCoach.app ends up in build/
There are two options to install Task Coach:
First, you can simply move this directory to some suitable location and run taskcoach.py (or taskcoach.pyw if you are on the Windows platform) from there.
Alternatively, you can use the Python distutils setup script to let Python install Task Coach for you. In that case run the following command:
python setup.py install
You may need to run this command as root if you get "Permission denied" errors:
sudo python setup.py install
If you have a previous version of Task Coach installed, you may need to force old files to be overwritten, like this:
python setup.py install --force
Task Coach is a desktop application, developed in Python and using wxPython for its GUI. Task Coach is more or less developed using the Model-View-Controller architectural style. Its main components are:
- the domain layer that consists of domain classes for tasks, categories, effort, notes and other domain objects,
- the gui layer that consists of viewers, controllers, dialogs, menu's and other GUI objects,
- the persistence layer that knows how to load and save domain objects from and to XML files (the .tsk files) and how to export domain objects to different formats, including HTML.
The layering is not strict: The domain layer has no knowledge of the gui and persistence layer. The persistence layer has no knowledge of the gui layer. But the gui layer has knowledge of both persistence and domain layer.
The Task Coach source code is organized in python packages. The most important and biggest packages are the domain packages that contains classes for the domain objects and the gui package that contains viewers, dialogs and other gui components.
The command package contains classes that implement user actions, e.g. adding a new task or deleting a category. These actions are all undoable and redoable. The package is called 'command' since it uses the so-called Command patterns to implement unlimited undo-redo.
The config package contains classes related to user configurable options that are saved in the TaskCoach.ini file, including all default values for the options.
The help package contains help files and the license.
The i18n ('internationalization') package contains the (generated) translation modules. These python modules are generated from the .po files (see taskcoach/i18n.in).
The mailer package contains modules to interact with email clients for email attachments and drag and drop from email clients.
The meta package contains meta information about Task Coach, such as author, version number, etc.
The patterns package contains base classes for design patterns such as Singleton and Observable that are used in other packages.
The persistence package contains modules for saving the Task Coach data in its .tsk file format, which actually is XML and for exporting data in different formats.
The thirdparty package contains third party modules that are used as is, but are included here to ease installation.
The widgets package contains widgets that are used in the gui package. These are mostly widgets from wxPython that need a slight adaption in their interface.