> Also, I think that bug #340022 should be solved before we can merge your patch and at a startdate column.
Why? Bug #340022 seems to have nothing in common with this except that it also thinks the Due date column should go away (but that is already covered by bug #497227.) The format for displaying things that #340022 suggests might be useful but I have no interest in implementing it myself. No one is working on #340022 afaik so predicating acceptance of this branch on solution of that bug just blocks me from being able to make this contribution, which is very discouraging to me.
> I think that this patch should come along with renaming "start date" to "defer to" or something similar
It is unclear what you mean by that.
> Interesting but I fail to see the usefulness of "Start today".
By default, no start date is set on tasks. If you want to indicate "I have started these tasks today" the only way to do it currently is to open each task individually and mark them such. This permits a simpler method for setting the start date to now for a range of tasks. This is helpful when you have a lot of tasks and are using start_date to help organize your tasks.
This functionality increases in importance with the defer to... functionality. The reason is because these functions make it easy to postpone tasks off into the future. For instance, I might write down 50 tasks for a project due in a few months, and then postpone the 20 tasks to next month. Now my 'Work View' is not cluttered with this future project. But then later I realize that 7 tasks need started sooner. I turn off 'Work View' so I can see the whole project, select the 7 tasks, and mark them 'Start Today'. Now those 4 tasks show up in my Work View.
> Also, I think that bug #340022 should be solved before we can merge your patch and at a startdate column.
Why? Bug #340022 seems to have nothing in common with this except that it also thinks the Due date column should go away (but that is already covered by bug #497227.) The format for displaying things that #340022 suggests might be useful but I have no interest in implementing it myself. No one is working on #340022 afaik so predicating acceptance of this branch on solution of that bug just blocks me from being able to make this contribution, which is very discouraging to me.
> I think that this patch should come along with renaming "start date" to "defer to" or something similar
It is unclear what you mean by that.
> Interesting but I fail to see the usefulness of "Start today".
By default, no start date is set on tasks. If you want to indicate "I have started these tasks today" the only way to do it currently is to open each task individually and mark them such. This permits a simpler method for setting the start date to now for a range of tasks. This is helpful when you have a lot of tasks and are using start_date to help organize your tasks.
This functionality increases in importance with the defer to... functionality. The reason is because these functions make it easy to postpone tasks off into the future. For instance, I might write down 50 tasks for a project due in a few months, and then postpone the 20 tasks to next month. Now my 'Work View' is not cluttered with this future project. But then later I realize that 7 tasks need started sooner. I turn off 'Work View' so I can see the whole project, select the 7 tasks, and mark them 'Start Today'. Now those 4 tasks show up in my Work View.