priorities in tasks

[David Faure]

On Friday 28 January 2005 06:12, Joon Radley wrote:
> 1) Boundary values like 3 and 7 in the scale of 1-9. In a 1-3 scale client
> (low, normal, high), is 3 low or normal and is 7 normal or high?

Whichever one you choose, mapping from 1-9 or mapping from 1-5 to a low/normal/high
client gives exactly the same issues.
The point is that apparently:
* KOrganizer uses 1-9
* Outlook 2k3 uses 3 values
Do older outlooks use 3 values too? Then there's no point in having 1-5 in the XML,
it just makes everything more complex (and korg->korg loses data).

> 2) With the interchange of data between clients you can have a loss of data.
Yes. But it would be good if interchange between *identical* implementations
didn't lose data. Hence the idea of switching to 1-9 so that at least
korg->korg and OL->OL don't lose data.

> If you have a task that must be at 4. When it converted a client with a 1-3
> scale it will now be converted to "normal" and when this is translated back
> it will be 5. If the distinction between 4 and 5 is very important, the data
> will be lost.
Sure. But there's nothing we can do about this (I don't think you're going to
introduce a 1-9 scale in outlook :-)

> 3) The last issue is interoperability. If the boss assigns the task a
> priority of 6 in one client the employee on a another client will see it in
> effect as a 5(normal). Depending on how important the difference is between
> 5 and 6 for the manager the employee can get in trouble.
> 
> We must be careful with priority translation as it is a very sensitive issue
> between humans and not just groupware object.

This is why we should at least ensure no "translation" when using the same
implementation, to reduce this problem. We can't solve the translation
that happens (for this data and quite some others) when exchanging data
between different implementations, but let's at least get it right for
the "same client" case. When I say korg->korg it even means: when one
korg users saves a todo, and reloads it later; currently values between 6 and 9 are lost...

-- 
David Faure -- faure at kde.org, dfaure at klaralvdalens-datakonsult.se
Qt/KDE/KOffice developer
Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB, Platform-independent software solutions