ref: 17b61799d9ecad647f6ce863882d19644476c1d8
dir: /README.md/
# todocli
This simple script makes us of Make's directed acyclic graph solving, to express TODO lists in a way that allows multiple hierarchies of parent/child relationships between different atomic tasks.
For example, here's a simple list.
```
# Birthday Party TODO
[ ] eat cake
[ ] blow out candles
[ ] give presents
```
Now traditionally, the other steps involved in making the above happen would be listed; perhaps even heirarchally:
```
# Birthday Party Prep
[ ] Get cake mix
[ ] Bake cake
[ ] Eat cake
[ ] Buy candles
[ ] Light candles
[ ] Blow out candles
[ ] Buy presents
[ ] Wrap presents
[ ] Give presents
```
Generally, that's enough for many tasks. But in the programming world, we develop hierarchies of things where multiple pieces, may depend on multiple, disperate pieces; a flat hierarchy doesn't suffice.
Now, many other methods use tagging to achieve this:
```
# Big project
[ ] Fix bug #92930
[ ] Ship update #3
[ ] Fix bug #01209
[ ] Ship update #3
```
This works wonderfully well, but it is not robust enough for multiple parent, multiple child relationships that may arise in real life. If Fix #92930 depends on 3 other things, one of which depends on #01209 we wouldn't be able to express that #01209 blocks the parent dependancies of #92930 cleanly.
Make solves these sort of dependancy hierarchies cleanly, and since I didn't want to write a solver itself at this time, why not just use it!
The scripts wrap the editing of a proper Makefile, though it is named config.todo to avoid name clobbering; which lives in the root of your project's source tree. Subsequent foo.todo files can be placed where you like them so long as they exist in the tree.
## .todo files
A .todo file contains a checklist of items to complete an atomic task. For example, `polygon.todo` may contain the following:
```
BUG #92930 - Trying to seek returns incomprehensible error when calling SomeCall
[ ] polygon.go: MyType should implement ReaderAt
[ ] polygon.go: Check return value of SomeCall and try to recover
[ ] polygon.go: Hand back better error info to the calling function
BUG #012099 - Blob considered too small by users
[ ] blob.go: Make blob 2x larger when it feels threatened
[ ] blob.go: Implement room bounds checking
```
## Automatically generate .todo files
Now, no one wants to write all that out all the time. Shouldn't this be able to pull a generic `// TODO:` tag, or `# TODO:`, etc? Yeah, I thought so too.
`todocli generate` will walk the source tree, looking `TODO`, `BUG`, `RELEASE`, and other related tags. If they have a tag, such as `BUG: #92930 Trying to seek returns incomprehensible error when calling SomeCall` it will be added automatically, in an entry similar to the one above.