[Planner Dev] planner bugs

[Robert Hoedicke <robert mental com>]

Hi,

we tried to use mrproject and its successor, planner 0.11 on our
project.

mrproject had some problems with printing:

- The bracket spanning the subtasks of a task would not render
  if it was completely spanning a page, it would only show up
  on pages that contained either the beginning or the end of
  the bracket.

- It would be nice if the grey vertical bars in the printout
  corresponded to holidays, and were not just arbirary.

Both mrproject and planner 0.11 have a severe problem, they apparently
can not handle dependencies between subtasks that belong to different
tasks. The Gant chart looks good at first, but when you save the plan
and look at it again in a new session, dependency arrows run backward in
time.

It is unfortunate that the tool does not provide an interface for reordering
resources. In mrproject it was possible to achive that by editing the
XML file, this aparently does no longer work in planner 0.11. When opening
an mrproject file in planner 0.11, the order of resources was reversed.

A very severe shortcoming is that both tools apparently do not handle
(not even detect) overbooking of resources. Detecting overbooking is
one of the main reasons for using such a tool in the first place.

Oh, and there was the occasional crash due to a segmentation violation.

Our admins complained of the huge list of things planner depends on.
Do you really need things as ugly as Perl to build it?

These problems will unfortunately prevent us from using planner on our
project, we might even be forced to use some MS-tool (eek), but I hope
that my comments may help you in improving planner.

Sincerely, Robert